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

31 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.

• 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

• metacritic  on  April 11, 2021

  Minor problems: There are too few serious reviews of cookbooks (most amount to one liners) – too few good blogs (most amount to throwaway declarations about what to cook or repeat better circulated essays).

  Major issues: There are far too few recipe ratings and comments. Select cookbooks attract a great many comments but many other serious cookbooks do not. And only slightly older cookbooks seem to have almost no reviews at all, even patron saints such as Paula Wolfert or Fergus Henderson or Alice Waters. I think that if you can’t solve for these issues, this site will never find a wider use even among serious amateur cooks and cookbook hoarders.

  I find the ability to search for recipes by ingredient very useful, the ability to see what other think of recipes useful but insufficiently developed (note that Chowhound and others offer better user bases quite often).

  A big step forward would be to stop charging membership and start obtaining revenue through ads. Or offer tiered membership in a manner that brings in more recipe reviewers but reserves other useful functions (search, for instance?) for paid subscribers.

• Jane  on  April 11, 2021

  Thanks for the feedback metacritic. In reply:

  Yes, there are not nearly as many reviews of cookbooks as there are of recipes, probably because most of our members find the recipe reviews most useful so that is what they add. Maybe this prompt will encourage others to add reviews of their favorite cookbooks. If we had the resources we would add more outside reviews (which are under the Reviews tab) – one day!

  There are more than 100,000 recipe reviews on EYB and they reflect the recipes our members are cooking. I think it is a fact that many books by “patron saints” are bought and read but rarely cooked from (hence fewer reviews). Most EYB members are “serious amateur cooks and cookbook hoarders” and the recipes they enjoy cooking are the ones they review.

  Thanks for the advice on how to fund the site but I can assure you that we would not have lasted 11 years if we relied on advertising revenue. Sites that do get funded by ads have many millions of site visitors per month. We did run advertising for Free visitors (the vast majority of our site traffic) for several years and the income was so low that we dropped it as it slowed down page loading and the irritation of seeing ads was not worth the small revenue.

  Free members can add Notes to books and recipes now so the tiered membership already operates.

• mzgourmand  on  April 12, 2021

  Hi Jane,

  Well, I am clearly not an early adapter but I just tried the bookmarks to csv feature & I LOVE it!! Thank you so much – the thoughtful improvement EYB keeps making are so useful!

• KennethJames  on  April 12, 2021

  I would like to know if the ‘notes’ section can be utilized to further define a specific category. For example, it would be very valuable for me to search my cookbook collection for “boneless chicken breasts” verses the generalized category of “chicken breasts”. Since the dawn of COVID19, I have been attempting to streamline my grocery in-store shopping experience to items that are on sale. I was told by the butcher that the quantity of ‘on sale meats’ will be greater and a better chance of securing what you need. My plan involved coupling the grocery store iOS app declared sale item, with my collection indexed by Eat Your Books. However, it was ‘mission failed”, because of the generalization described above. Any thoughts on a possible of future solution?

• dzeldaz  on  June 18, 2021

  Wow! I have learned so much from the article and from the comments. More ways for me to love EYB! (Thank you for not running ads. I would much rather pay the reasonable membership fee.)

• acorgihouse  on  June 22, 2021

  I have been using EYB for several years. I have 214 cookbooks, and luckily most are indexed. I have a wall of shelves that is all cooking, cookbooks plus some magazines I want to keep, and some notebooks I’ve made of recipes from cooking classes, etc. I came here today to add a couple books I just bought, and saw this. I went back to my bookshelf, and used the sort function to put them in alphabetical order. I had them sorted by major topic, like veg or grill, but so many are multi topic. I then tried the “fad” sort by book color, thinking if they were otherwise random I could just pull one out to give me ideas, but then if I search a book by EYB, if I don’t recall the color of the book, I’m stuck. This coming weekend, I’ll alphabetize them, and I’ll have the site to use to make a new list when I add books. I’ll put the current list in my OneDrive, so I can pull it up when wondering “do I have this?” or “where is this?” It’s perfect, for me.

• shaneandemma  on  October 9, 2021

  I think a random selection button would be awesome. Would let people go to some corners of their book and recipe collections that they have never visited or forgotten about.

• Mermaidslayer  on  October 16, 2021

  Tell metacritic from me that the subscription model is perfect and I for one would hate EYB to be full of ads. Also I use EYB to find my recipes, not read other people’s opinions!