There are now more than 100,000 cookbooks on our members' Bookshelves.  The number of members owning each book varies from 550 for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One down to lots of books just owned by one member.  You can check out who else owns your cookbooks by clicking Other Bookshelves under book details.  Then you can look at all the books you have in common (or maybe more interestingly, the ones they own that you don't) by clicking on the member name.

The largest Bookshelf is the French Culinary Institute with 2,090 books and the largest private library is Cotonqueen with 939 books.

Our own Susie Chang has just been awarded 3rd place in the biennial MFK Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing (administered by Les Dames d'Escoffier International).  The story so honored was last year's Gather Ye Squash Blossoms While Ye May on NPR.  Congratulations Susie - a great honor!

The import of books data from around the world is now complete, a total of nearly 79,000 cookbooks and books on food from the USA & Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  So you should now be able to add most of your books to your Bookshelf.  Any you find that we don't have, import the ISBNs using the Import Books feature and we will add them to the Library, and they will automatically be added to your Bookshelf.

If you have a lot of books to add, the Import Books feature is definitely the way to do it.  I had hundreds of British books I hadn't been able to add yet but I imported them all in minutes by cut and pasting the ISBNs from a catalog I had on LibraryThing.  If you don't have the ISBNs cataloged anywhere then you can scan the ISBNs directly using a barcode scanner.  I bought one through amazon.com which worked really well but also tried a much cheaper iPhone app (99c) from Red Laser, which wasn't as easy to use but had the advantage that you didn't have to be near the computer (and was much cheaper).

We will be doing some essential maintenance on the website this morning which will require the site to be down for up to 5 hours from 10:30am (EST).  Apologies if you need to use EYB at that time.

Hopefully you will find the inconvenience worth it, as we will then be increasing the size of the EYB Library to over 100,000 cookbooks at the end of the week.

We have added some fun new features to Community - let us know what you think.  We would love contributions from EYB members for some of them - Hot Find, Puzzler and Buzz from the Web are all places where your input would be helpful.  So if you see something that you think would fit in one of those categories, please email us at info@eatyourbooks.com.  We will soon be adding contact links below each section.

We got back home today after two weeks on the road.  In two weeks we visited San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and New York.  Had some wonderful experiences, climaxing Sunday night with the James Beard Awards in NY.  A parade of amazing cookbook authors took the stage - Claudia Roden (Cookbook Hall of Fame for A Book of Middle Eastern Food), Thomas Keller (who won with Ad Hoc at Home in the General Cooking category), Colman Andrews (who won both International and Cookbook of the Year for The Country Cooking of Ireland) plus many more.  See the full list of cookbook winners on our James Beard Awards page.

While we were in New York (seeing cookbook publishers) we fitted in two pilgrimages - one to Kitchen Arts & Letters, the Mecca of cookbooks. I managed to have great self-restraint and 'only' bought six new cookbooks.  The other was to The French Culinary Institute - their fabulous library of 4,000 cookbooks is the largest bookshelf on EYB (and they aren't all added yet).

We just got back from the IACP Cookbook Awards where I presented the Eat Your Books Award.  All the nominees were tremendous books - we were delighted to present it to Stephanie Alexander for Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion.  Well I would have done if she had been there so it went to Lauraine Jacobs from New Zealand (an ex-IACP President and cookbook author herself) who collected it on her behalf.  See all the winners on the IACP Awards page.

We had our first day today at the IACP Conference in Portland, Oregon.  It was a packed and exciting day.  Lots of networking and meeting interesting people.  And tonight there was the opening reception where Portland's finest chefs and vineyards produced the food and wine.  Excessive sampling of everything ensued.  But the highlight for me was that I met Madhur Jaffrey - I should have got a photo with her but was just too much in awe.

We are soon planning to test the new EYB searches that we have been working away at recently.  It will take about 30-40 minutes and you would do it from home on your own computer, on April 27 or 29.  If you think you might be interested please email me at info@eatyourbooks.com with some basic info - age, work/at-home/retired, # of cookbooks, if any children, etc.  We're not being nosey, we're just trying to fit the testers to the user profiles we have created for the website.  We also need some people who have never used EYB at all to test it so if you know anyone who has not yet joined but might be interested ask them to contact us.  Testers who are non-members will get a free Lifetime membership and if they are already members they will get an equivalent value book voucher (to buy new cookbooks of course).

The other help I am looking for is to find cookbook indexers in Canada, Ireland, and the UK (paid freelance positions).  We really want people experienced in data entry, preferably food related (someone who already does back-of-the-book cookbook indexes is ideal).  Again contact me at info@eatyourbooks.com.

Today we added our 1,000th indexed book - that is almost quarter of a million recipes now indexed.  Since we added two books at the same time, I couldn't decide which was the 1,000th since they seemed equally deserving. So we proclaim both Well Preserved by Eugenia Bone AND Tuscan Cookbook  by Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer as our 1,000th book.  Fittingly, both Eugenia and Stephanie are nominees for 2009 Cookbook Awards - Stephanie for the Eat Your Books Award at IACP and Eugenia for the Single Subject Award at James Beard.