Ideas on how to make EYB work better for you (updated with EYB new features and helpful articles)

April 2, 2020 by
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While many of us are isolating, working from home, helping our kids with their tele-education, we might be looking for tasks to take our mind off the pandemic. Below are a few ideas to make EYB work better for you.

Finish getting your Bookshelf set up – we are sure there are members who have never completed their Bookshelf. Get your shelves organized, check to make sure all your books are on EYB. If you find duplicate titles, you can gift a neighbor or friend the duplicate (and tell them about EYB!)

Index one of your much-loved books – something useful that can help to stop you obsessing about the pandemic on social media. If you ever started a book and didn’t finish it, now is the time to get it done. There are almost 400 books assigned to members in 2019 and before that are unfinished. Our Data Manager, Deborah, is currently contacting these members reminding them that either the book should be finished or we will unassign it.

Go through some of your favorite books, adding bookmarks, notes and photos if you have them. Jane personally finds it really helpful to go through a book or magazine and add the tag “I want to cook this” then when looking for a recipe she can narrow down the results to recipes she has already identified as of interest. As while you are going through your cookbooks and magazines you may be inspired to try some new dishes!

Helpful tips:

One of our members asked about putting in a section where they could make a comment about where their particular book was on their actual bookshelves. I suggested that she make a personal note on the book record as to where the book was located. For instance, bookcase one, third shelf, living room. Or if you just want to know a general location e.g. beach house or basement, create Bookmarks for those. These will help you find the book but also you can limit your search to just that location.

Gifting an EYB membership to a friend or family member who may be struggling to figure out what to cook is a wonderful idea. Ask them to send you photos of their cookbook collection. Make some excuse like “I can recommend some recipes for you if you let me know what books you own”. Then set up their Bookshelf for them and gift it to them. With Mother’s Day and Father’s Day coming up, now is a great time.

Please leave a comment if you have any tips that you would like to share!

Update 4/3/2021 – Other articles about new EYB features and more:

Category: Antipasto

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24 Comments

  • FrenchCreekBaker  on  April 4, 2020

    I quit organizing because I moved in mid stream of adding books to my library and have not yet had the gumption to start the project over to figure out what is not yet loaded. I had over 400 done but many more to go. Any tips on fastest way to upload titles?

    How do people handle dealing with the many books not yet indexed they own? Just put those books on separate bookshelves?

    Good tips in this article about bookmarking!

    Thanks ❣️

  • okmosa  on  April 4, 2020

    Hi FrenchCreekBaker – You can use the ISBN number and import multiple titles at a time.

  • Jane  on  April 5, 2020

    FrenchCreekBaker – this is the Help section on adding books using the ISBN numbers. There are links there as well on adding the ISBN numbers using a barcode scanner.
    You don’t need to set up different Bookshelves for indexed and unindexed books. There are filters at top right on your Bookshelf Books tab that allow you to just see your Indexed books or your Unindexed books. In fact you actually want all your unindexed books on the same Bookshelf as you want the recipes in your searches as soon as the book is indexed.

  • hegasaer  on  April 7, 2020

    I’m absolutely new to EYB which I stumbled across while web-surfing.
    I have no real handle on its purpose or how it works I just KNOW it will be helpful in enabling me to access great recipes from my favourite magazine, Feast.
    Can you point me to a beginner’s guide to using EYB please!

  • Jane  on  April 7, 2020

    hegasaer – delighted to hear that you stumbled across EYB. For new members we recommend going through our Tutorials, accessed from the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not available on phones). We also have comprehensive Help pages including a Getting Started section and About Us that explains how the site works.

  • amandabeck  on  April 9, 2020

    It would be great if you could incentivize more people to rate and review recipes. This would make EYB a bigger value-add for paid subscribers. Perhaps you can hold back some of the cookbook copies you give away in lotteries on the blog and instead have a lottery for people who submit at least 5 or 10 recipe reviews per month…Kind of like Yelp Elite.

  • fairyduff  on  April 21, 2020

    I have a number of community published books without an ISBN, (fundraiser items at school fetes, church groups, etc.) I use the Enter Personal Recipes function to add selected recipes from these, and then they turn up in my ingredient searches! (When I have finished entering those, I am going to raid my recipe clippings in the filing cabinet.)
    Searching through EYB online recipes using EYB ingredient search has been helpful to locate long lost favourites. Yep, I’ve added them to my bookshelf, too!
    I love this website!

  • diamondkitchen  on  May 10, 2020

    In the Helpful Tips section of this post, you mentioned ways to locate our books on our bookshelves. I have another suggestion. It worked well for me. I own about 108 cookbooks, but just 25 of those are currently indexed by EATYOURBOOKS, so I have put a brightly-colored circular sticker on the spine of each cookbook and then placed them all on one shelf. That way it is easy to locate the book fast when I want to find a certain one. If another family member puts the book back on the shelf in an odd place, the sticker allows me to spot it quickly and once again place it within the correct cluster. If I choose to organize my books by categories, then the green stickers will still help me locate them even if they are scattered all around. The one drawback was that the stickers kept falling off the books that had slick dustcovers, so I placed clear tape on them to secure them, as they do in public libraries.

  • manycookbooks  on  May 12, 2020

    I currently have about 6,500 cookbooks, of which, 5,552 appear in EYB. It has been a terrific tool to have and I search it almost daily for recipe ideas, etc. As for the ones not on EYB (yet!), it’s the old-fashioned manual search for recipes. I have a great database for the books (collectorz.com), but can’t search for recipes, just book titles and a lot more info. I too, stumbled across EYB some years ago, accidentally and have never looked back. Not only incredibly useful but a bargain too!

  • rstaudt  on  May 30, 2020

    Is there any way to add books that I have checked out from the library to my EYB bookshelf temporarily (with a 3-week expiration)? I am lucky that our local public library has a superb collection of cookbooks and I often have 10-15 out at a time. However, it’s a real challenge to add them and then remember to delete them from EYB when they need to go back. And I would like to see them prioritized in my recipe searches so that I get a good taste of whether they are cookbooks worthy of a permanent home on my shelves. Any suggestions?
    Thanks!

  • Tinluz18  on  June 3, 2020

    Love the idea… Cant fathom out how to use it!! Trying to add books to my bookshelf but doesn’t seem to search… Getting frustrated now! Help!! 😂

  • Jane  on  June 3, 2020

    Tinluz18 – I am emailing you with suggestions. But for other new members who have difficulties, try the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not on phones) for tutorials that walk you through the features. Or Getting Started in Help.

  • etcjm  on  June 5, 2020

    I have many random recipes which I’ve copied over the years, some I’ve cooked, some I haven’t. When I had some time at home last year, I scanned them in and saved them on my google drive (just with my camera on my tablet) and saved with a suitable name and in a suitable named folder. These recipes were more than likely not from a book I own, so when I search for a recipe which I know for a fact I’ve read somewhere I just search on EYB or my google drive. Little bit convoluted, but I got rid of a lot of bits of paper and magazine scraps and only kept physical copies of regularly used recipes. I just print it from google drive if I want to cook it, keep if it works, bin it and delete it if it’s a flop. You can even make notes like you can on EYB. I share my folders with my sons so they have access to recipes we use a lot. I like the other ideas of incentivizing reviews and the library additions. Love the website, use it regularly and have cooked many different things because of good reviews.

  • MarianneShirk  on  June 23, 2020

    I would love to see an option for a calendar so we could meal plan right on the site – it would integrate everything and we could add the recipes and grocery lists right there with the meal plan

  • Jenjeanh  on  August 8, 2020

    Some very good ideas here. I also have the issue of having so many community published books that will never be indexed but I would like to use more so I liked the suggestion to just add them as personal recipes

    As to temporarily adding library books, what a good idea, I love getting the books from the library to preview but never thought of adding them temporarily

    I would suggest adding a bookmark “library” when you add the title and then when you take them back you can limit your book search by bookmark “library” and just delete those

  • marthafan  on  August 16, 2020

    Well, what do you know!!! I have been a member for a few years now, and just today after reading the above on how to have EYB work better for you, I learned something very valuable. The “NOTES” section for each book. I think I had seen it before, but never questioned or even thought about it’s use. I love your idea on putting in the notes section, the book location. With having well over 1200 books in 2 different main areas (living room bookcases & “library” in my basement) sometimes it can be hard to remember exact location if a book totters on more than 1 category. I was going to suggest you develop a section or category for signed books. With more cookbook authors having book signing events, it would be nice to know instantly on what cookbooks are signed. Maybe I’m the only one who would like such a thing, which I guess I could utilize the notes section for this too. Thanks for being here though. You have no idea how helpful I have found this site to be and I am always singing your praises to others.

  • Jane  on  August 16, 2020

    marthafan – another option is to create your own bookmark “Signed” then add it to those books in your collection. If you need help on Bookmarks, look at tutorial #4 from the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not available on phones) or this Help section.

  • CarlaCookery  on  August 23, 2020

    Besides looking at my own books, I love to browse the cookbooks in the library. I’d love to be able to mark the books I want to purchase at a later date. Like a wishlist.

  • lorloff  on  September 5, 2020

    Hi all. I wanted to weigh in on the successful system I use to locate books. There are two tabs in the bookmark section of EYB. Every time I add a book to my collection I add a bookmark for the shelf that it is located on. For example I have floor to ceiling bookshelves just outside of my kitchen. I call these Cookbook shelves Left 1, 2, 3 ect or Basement front room shelf 4. It works really well I have over 1700 cookbooks. I also group the books in specific locations like having a separate set of cookbook shelves for my Asian book books – Asian cookbook shelf 3. The system works really well.

  • bbeckman  on  October 1, 2020

    What is the most efficient way to upload NYTimes recipes?

  • Jane  on  October 9, 2020

    bbeckman – you can use the Bookmarklet to index any NYT recipe. This is explained in Help. Though we already have more than 5,000 NYT recipes indexed so you may find those you want are already in the Library. You can also add any of the 9 indexed NYT columns to your Bookshelf.

  • demomcook  on  December 29, 2020

    When I was first adding my books, I took a photograph of a shelf of books and used that as a guide to add the books to EYB. I didn’t think about location at the time, so I still need to go back and add this information.

  • stockholm28  on  February 2, 2021

    For rstaudt’s comment about managing library books …

    I have a bookmark ”library” and a bookmark ”own” and every book has one of these bookmarks. This allows me to search only the books I have out from the library or only books I own.

  • Alisono  on  March 4, 2021

    I arranged mine by author and it worked really well until we moved house and they all got jumbled up! Inspired to reorganise when time permits. Thanks for the article x

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