Quick Tour

• The Community page is where you will find up to date information on Cookbooks and Authors and what's happening at Eat Your Books. Our resident reviewer Susie Chang will provide reviews on the latest books and she'll let you know what her favorite books are for different subjects.
• You can chat with other cookbook lovers on the EYB Forum about any number of topics. If you don't find one that interests you, create your own.
• You can see which Cookbooks appear on the most Bookshelves.
• You can compare your own with other Members' Bookshelves, giving you ideas for your next Cookbook purchase.

• My EYB is your own personal Home Page, with a summary of your activities. At a glance you can see how many cookbooks, and therefore recipes, you have added; who’s invited you to join a Forum Group; who has invited you to be an EYB Friend – or accepted your invitation.
• My EYB will update automatically to reflect your current activity on EYB.

• The EYB library is where you will find an extensive list of over 16,000 cookbooks, most have been categorized and over 880 have been indexed. It is from this extensive list that you build, My Bookshelf, your own virtual bookshelf of the cookbooks that you own.
• Books have been categorized by many different criteria, including Ethnicity, Special Diet, Book Type and Occasion. You can use this information to find your next cookbook - so if you're looking for a book on Couscous from Morocco - it will take just seconds.
• You can find out what other members are saying about books and recipes and, if you wish, you can click through to purchase books online from Jessica's Biscuit, our chosen cookbook partner.

• My Bookshelf is an online depiction of the cookbooks you already own.  Once you have added books from the EYB Library to your Bookshelf, you can search through all the indexed books for recipes.
• You can view a list of all of your cookbooks, including a summary about each book. Or click on the book title to get more detailed information. If the book has been indexed you can see a list of all the recipes.
• So far more than 880 books have recipe indexes. The comprehensive indexing means that you can find the recipes in your cookbooks in a number of different, intuitive ways.
• If you find we haven’t indexed one of your favorite cookbooks you can place a request for the book to be indexed by clicking on the RI icon.

• For the books in your Bookshelf, that have been indexed, you can search for recipes in two ways, either: Quick Search where you can quickly type in one ingredient or recipe name or Advanced Search which gives you far more comprehensive searching abilities.

• Using Advanced Search you can search for a recipe by
  • recipe name
  • recipe type
  • ingredient
  • ingredient type
  • book title
  • author
  • ethnicity
  • category
  • special diet
  • occasion
  • meal/course
  • country
  • date of publication

You can even exclude recipes with a particular ingredient - useful when for cooking for people with allergies.

• Every book in the EYB Library has its own Book Details page with the following information (varies from book to book):
  • Recipes - If the book is indexed you will see a list of all the recipes.
  • Book Detail - including the publisher's description; publishing information; all classifications - both your own and EYB's; your book location;
  • Ratings and Comments find out what other members think of it.
  • Other Bookshelves - who else owns the book.
• If you don’t own the book yourself, or you want to buy it for a friend, there is also a link to purchase the book from Jessica's Biscuit (ecookbooks.com), our chosen cookbook partner.

• Clicking on any recipe title will take you to the Recipe Details page. Here you will find a summary of information about the recipe:
  • All Classifications, both your own and EYB's.
  • A list of all the main Ingredients.
  • Suggested Accompaniments - other recipes from the book that the Author recommends with this recipes.
  • Ratings and Comments from other members - you can add your own.
  • Icons to show if it's on your Favorites list or your Do Laters list.
  • Book Details that the recipe is from.

Note: The Recipe Detail does not contain the quantities or the method. Eat Your Books is not a recipe site - it helps you find recipes you want from the thousands you own in your cookbooks.

• When you've cooked something special you often want to mark it in some way so you can easily find it again. No more bending over corners or putting in a stickie - you can assign a recipe to your Favorites. You can search in or just view your Favorites, which makes it very easy to organise and find those tried and tested recipes that you keep coming back to.

• Similarly with Do Laters – when you're browsing through your cookbooks you often see a recipe that you would like to try sometime in the future. To make it easy to find these recipes you can mark it as a Do Later.

• Classifications - gives you a summary of your cookbook library. You can see a complete breakdown of how your recipes and books are classified. Have you ever wondered how many Italian recipes or ice-cream recipes you had?
• There are all sorts of ways to search your cookbooks to find the book or recipe you're looking for. EYB have classified thousands of books and recipes and you can use these when searching. For example you might want to search for Low Fat Dessert recipes or Argentinian Soups or perhaps great recipes for Children’s Birthday parties.
• You can also create your own Categories, so you can tag recipes and books with classifications that are meaningful to you and find them when you need them. One recipe can have many different classifications, which means you will be easily be able to find that Moroccan Casserole dish, using chicken and lemon.

• Whether you’re planning an important dinner party, a Thanksgiving dinner, or just your meals for the week, Eat Your Books helps with your planning by storing your selected recipes in a Menu.
• You can have as many menus as you wish. From your Menu Planner you can create a shopping list. You can keep your menus as a reference or to use again for future occasions. It's easy to add or delete from a menu.

• Eat Your Books makes it easy for you to create a Shopping List from either the individual recipes you have selected or from Menus you have created using the Menu Planner. The shopping list will itemize all of the main ingredients needed for your recipes and categorize them by grocery aisles.
• You can print the list to use at the grocery store.

• If you have quite a few cookbooks, the chances are they may be stored in different places. With Eat Your Books you can assign a Location for each book, so when you've selected a recipe you'll very easily be able to find the book it's from.
• The Locations feature is also very useful if you own more than one house - it's no good searching for recipes in books that are at the holiday house 200kms away! When you perform a search, just specify which location you want to look in.

• Use the EYB Forum to find out what others are saying about the latest cookbooks. Ask other members for recommendations for new cookbooks or just enjoy chatting to other members who share your love of cookbooks.
• Join in to existing Forum topics or if you've got a particular area of cooking that interests you start your own topic and invite others to join you.