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A Quick Guide To Getting Started

Welcome to Eat Your Books. Having taken the first step to register as a member, we'd like to make sure your experience is a good one. By following these 3 easy steps you will soon be exploring your cookbooks like never before. If you have any problems at all please Contact Us and we'll be happy to give you any extra guidance or support you need. You will also find support in the How To section and you might like to take a Site Overview to get a good understanding of what you can do as a member of Eat Your Books.

Before we show you how to make the most of Eat Your Books, here is an explanation of some of the terms we use:

  • EYB Library - is a listing of over 79,000 cookbooks. This is not only one of the most comprehensive lists of cookbooks anywhere, but we have gone further and categorized most of the books by several different criteria. So you can find an Italian book on Baking, published within the last 5 years in seconds.
  • My Bookshelf - is created by you - it is an online depiction of the cookbooks you already own at home.  Once you have added books from the EYB Library to your Bookshelf, you can search through all the indexed books for recipes.
  • Indexed Books - are the cookbooks that have been indexed by EYB. A recipe index contains the following information for each recipe:
    • Recipe name
    • The main ingredients used
    • The author and title of the book the recipe is from
    • Categories - some or all of the following:
      ethnicity; recipe type; meal type; special diet; occasion

So you can find out if you have any cookbooks with a Greek Beef Casserole in seconds.

Note: We do not provide the full recipe, we are not a recipe website - Eat Your Books helps you find the right recipe in your own cookbooks.

Getting Around EYB

You can navigate your way around Eat Your Books in a number of different ways:

Navigation Buttons at the top of the screen

The big navigation buttons across the top of the screen will take you directly to:

  1. My EYB - for an overview of your EYB activities.
  2. EYB Library - to search in over 79,000 books and 270,000 recipes.
  3. Community - for up to date information about the cookery book world.


The Navigation Pane on the left hand side of the screen

There are three different sections to the Navigation Pane on the left hand side:

  1. Search - which allows you to search the contents of both My Bookshelf and EYB Library
  2. My ... - which gives you direct access to the options listed e.g. Profile, Favorites, Shopping List etc
  3. Community - which takes you to the EYB Blog and Forum discussions
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STEP 1 - Search for your books in the EYB Library

 

  1. Under the Search heading, click on EYB Library.
  2. Select the EYB Cookbooks tab.
  3. This is your Quick Search box, you can either type in an author’s name (and get all the books by that author) or you can type in the name of a book. You will notice as you start typing a drop down box appears, rather than typing the full name you can select from the list.
  4. Press the green Search button.
  5. To do a more comprehensive search use Advanced Search. See the How To section.
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STEP 2 - Select your books

  1. Select the book/s you own by ticking the box next to the image.
  2. Click on Add to Bookshelf button on the green bar.
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STEP 3 - Personalize your Bookshelf

Before you save your cookbooks to your Bookshelf you can add further information to make finding recipes even easier. You can assign a Location to a book (in case you keep them in different rooms or houses), assign a Rating and a Comment. You can also add your own Categories. EYB have categorized most books, but you may like to create others that have meaning for you - see below for how to set up your own Locations and Categories.

  1. Add your Categories, Location, Comments and Ratings now or later.
  2. Either click the green Go to My Bookshelf button to save and go to your Bookshelf.
  3. OR - Press the green Add More Books button to save and go back to the EYB Library to add more books.

You now know how to add books to your Bookshelf. For information on how to set up Locations and Categories see below - or go to the How To section for help on other topics.

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Adding Categories to your books

At Eat Your Books we have categorized most books and recipes with reasonably standard terms. You might like to set up your own categories that can be used for either books or recipes that have meaning to you. Anything from "meals that the mother-in-law might like" to "baking for school bake sales".

Setting up Categories

  1. Under the 'My ...' heading, select the Classifications option.
  2. Click on the Add Category button.
  3. Type in the name of a category that will be useful to you.
  4. Click on Add Category.
  5. Once you have created a category you can add books and recipes to it.
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Adding Locations to your books

You may have books located in several rooms of your house, or even in different houses. To help you keep track of these and to make it easier to find only recipes in a particular location you can set up Locations and assign them to all your books.

Setting up Locations

  1. Under the 'My ...' heading, select the Locations option.
  2. Click on the Add Location button.
  3. Type in the name of Location where you keep your books, and, if you want, a Description of the Location.
  4. Click on Add Location.
  5. Once you have created a Location you can assign books to it.
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