Forum

First of all -- this is a great site, love the concept, so useful.

One new feature that would be really useful is a way to add books to a "Wish List" that you could manage, share, and purchase books from later.  When I'm searching, I see so many other books I want to own, but I can't buy them all at once; it would be great to capture them as I find them, then I can revisit the list and purchase them over time (or drop subtle hints about gift giving).

Really, this would not be a feature I would look for here. There are plenty of places already to make a wishlist (amazon, LibraryThing). Also, it does not connect directly with the main point of this website, which is to be better able to find your own recipes.

I would like better linking to LibraryThing, though...

Firefox has an add-on called Wish List. It puts the app button on your menu bar and you can add anything to your Amazon wish list, even items not found on Amazon. You can create additional Wish Lists in Amazon too. So, you could have a Wish List called "Cookbooks" and then any book you want, just click the button "Add To Wish List" and add it to "Cookbooks". It doesn't navigate you away from the page you are on.

...and when people ask you what you would like for gifts, just send them the link to your wish list and voila! - just what you wanted for your birthday every time!

lchalifoux - we probably will add a wish list feature though it's not a high priority at the moment.  The feature would be there if you wanted it and you could ignore it if it's not something you would find useful.

HeatherT - thanks for the info on the Firefox add-on for wishlists.

wester - what type of linking to LibraryThing would you like?  We currently have the books import feature where you can import all your ISBNs from your LT listings.  What types of other links would be useful?

And are there other books cataloging sites that EYB members use (e.g. GoodReads) to which links would be helpful?

Jane - what I would like is a direct link from the book page on LT to adding a book to EYB, and vice versa. A bit like the linking with BookMooch is now. Really ideal would be a way to move a complete LT collection, or books with a certain tag, to EYB, but I know that's too difficult.

At the moment, when I want to add a book from LT to EYB, I have to find the ISBN on LT, copy it, go to import books in EYB and paste it there. Possible, but not really convenient, especially if it's a lot of books.

This site is a great concept, but I find it so unintuitive to navigate it made me headachey and cross.

1) It'sdifficult to find a search box for recipes. Isn't that the whole point of the site? Why is it so buried?

2) So you go to the EYB Library tab -- not My EYB, even though you're looking for a recipe in your own collection (and it's right next to Community, making it look like EYB Library might mean other people's collections) -- then you choose Recipes or Cookbooks tab and once you've finished setting up your collection, you're looking for recipes, but it's set to Cookbooks by default -- then you need to move over to a different part of the page specifically inform it to check only your collection, instead of showing you an infinite number of recipes you have no access to. I can see why a person might every now and then be curious what recipes are in cookbooks they don't own, but, again, if the purpose of the site is to be a workable index of one's own cookbooks, then surely My Bookshelf should be the default.  So you have to click two separate tabs and a drop-down box just to set up a simple search. About the fifth time I ran into that, it started feeling easier, and more fun, to get out my cookbooks.

3) My EYB doesn't have anything that's personalized to me at all. It's just overall site news. Over and over I click on this tab that has nothing I'm looking for, while my own bookshelf of cookbooks is difficult to find.

4) The process of putting a rating on a cookbook is long and involved and frustrating. When I see a set of empty stars next to a cookbook and it says My Rating, I naturally click on it to give it my rating, as on amazon.com. Instead nothing happens. I blink and click, getting more frustrated, as other people's ratings sit there taunting me, but apparently I'm not allowed to rate a book. Finally I discover you have to click on the book name ... another set of unresponsive empty stars ... another slow-loading page ... and then on the Ratings & Comments tab, and I can finally leave a rating! If it's not possible to leave a rating on any other page, then you should change the graphics so it doesn't look like it's inviting you to -- as other sites are when they show those same graphics.

5) Finally, the recipe search -- which I still can't reliably find, even after typing out the guide above -- purports to be by recipe name, but instead pulls up every recipe that lists the ingredient, even in minute quantity -- even if it's only in the serving suggestions! That's a nice *extra* feature to have, but it's not very useful as a default search.  And if you want to actually search by title, you have to go to Advanced Search!

Positives: great concept, site is pretty, you had all the cookbooks I checked.

Thank you HungryNora for all your feedback.  We are launching a complete redesign of the website in the next few weeks which will resolve the issues you raised.  We have incorporated a lot of great feedback we received from members over the last few months and we did intensive usability testing so we think you will find the new user interface much easier to use, and not at all headache inducing.

1) You can search for books and recipes in your own Bookshelf or in the entire EYB Library so there does have to be two different areas for the searches.  However the new design is much more obvious.

2) I think the issue here is that you are going to the EYB Library to search in My Bookshelf.  At the top of the left navigation bar is Search and you here click My Bookshelf and you are taken straight to the search for books or recipes in your own collection.  Yes, it does default to books which is wrong and this is reversed in the new search.  So it is two clicks to start searching your recipes (and will soon be one).  You have so far added 14 books to your Bookshelf which gives you 4,653 recipes to search through in seconds.  Searching through the indices of just those 14 books is going to take far longer than two clicks, and EYB indexes far more ingredients and categories than are listed in back-of-the-book indices.

3) We plan to develop the social networking and My EYB side of the website once we have completed the user interface redesign.  Eat Your Books is a new website, still in beta, and we will be adding lots of new features in the coming months.  This is why we are offering the lifetime membership while we are in beta.  Our members have been very supportive of the improvements we have been making.  If you have ever been involved with web site design or software development you will know how long these developments take to get right.

4) In the new search your ratings can be added anywhere that you see the ratings stars.

5) Quick search is a basic search using one recipe name or one ingredient name. As it is one search term for both fields it obviously is matching in both.   Advanced search is much more sophisticated - you can enter the words you want in any of the fields and enter multiple ingredients or categories.  New search will not separate quick and advanced search - there will be one search box but a lot of filtering options by ingredients and categories.

Thank you for the positive feedback as well.  I think in a few months you will find that the website does everything you want and more.  As you seem to find it frustrating to use a website that isn't fully developed you may be better to wait until we have come out of our beta phase.  We will be offering a second 30-day trial to all members who tried us while we were in beta but didn't sign up for a full membership.  We will retain your data so you would not need to enter your books again.

You can currently move an entire LT collection and just import books to EYB with a certain tag.  I did it with my own collection.  The instructions are in the How to section of Help.  Once you have exported the LT data, sort it by tags then just import the ISBNs for books that have the tags you want in EYB.

Individual books isn't so easy but still isn't hard.  I just have LT and EYB (Import Books) open when I am adding new books and I add them both at the same time.  I do have a barcode scanner that makes it quicker but if you don't then you just enter the ISBN once in LT (which you would have to do anyway) then copy it to EYB. Once you have finished then just import all the ISBNs in one go.  It's actually quicker than LTs system!

Thanks, Jane.  I really love EYB -- I'm a Lifetime Member now.  Nice to see you on eGullet too!

I like the WishList concept because I don't want to go anywhere else for my cookbooks; this is where I want to live!  I don't even care if I can't buy books directly from my wishlist; I just want a way to record all the great cookbooks I come across during the natural process of using EYB to manage my library and search for recipes.

I also love that real people respond so quickly and constructively to requests.  I'm certain that EYB is going to be a huge success.  Just please don't sell yourselves to a major company for a giant amount of money -- I know you'll get offers.  Well, of course, who could blame you....

Thank you so much lchalifoux for your kind words.  Don't worry, Fiona and I love doing this too much to sell out.  This is my dream job - dealing with the world's cookbooks and cookbook collectors!

Wished-for features:

1. To be able to select a default ordering for my own lists different from the EYB default.  That is, by author, then book title, then recipe title -- it's the most natural sort order for someone using the site as intended, to generate a list of recipes that we'd then go look at in the books themselves.   

2. To be able to choose how to order recipes within a menu.    Aside from not having any control over that, the default EYB sort order seems to change between the compact list (the one that shows when you first click on a menu) and the long-form list that prints out.

3. Speaking of that compact list of recipes shown when you first click on a menu: it would be excellent to include the author or a short version of the book title (so that the info still fits on one line), and to have that list of recipes printable as is (rather than in the long form that you get when you hit 'print').

I've already found the site useful in the short time I've been a member.  Thanks so much for making it easier to take advantage of my cookbooks!

1. The new search will change the way the sort works.  At the moment you cannot select your own default but that is certainly something we could add.

2/3. The menus and shopping lists are going to be reworked soon when we design the mobile interface so we will take those points into consideration.

So glad to hear you are getting more use from your cookbooks.

Does this mean that there will soon be an iPhone/iPad app for EYB?

New feature request: Forum Viewing:

I find that when I click on a topic in the Forum, it takes me to the top of the topic, even if I've visited it previously.  Right now it's not too big of an issue because there aren't that many posts in any topic, but later it could become really annoying as the number of posts grows.  It would be far preferable to be taken to either the bottom of the topic, or, ideally, to the first post since I last visited. 

Yes, we do plan an app though it will be an interface that can be used by any smartphone.

On our to-do list is to make the Forum easier to use - searches, navigation to last post read, etc.  We will be asking for suggestions on ways members would like it to be improved.

EYB certainly does intensify and enlarge a typical user's cookbook wishlist. 

Until there's a specific feature for that, my workaround has been to create a Location called 'wishlist'.   Our local library has such a strong cookbook collection that I'm also considering creating a 'library' location.

I'm new so maybe I missed these features....

I'd like to be able to export (or print) my booklist to a spreadsheet.  I don't mean anything fancy, just title, author, and isbn so I can compare the my eyb bookshelf to my home bookshelves and vice versa. Exporting my recipe search results to a spreadsheet would also be handy.  I could search and export the results of my recipe search to a spreadsheet and then go home and pull the books.

I only have internet access at work or internet cafes, my books are at home, so I end up carrying hand written lists back and forth. 

So far I'm impressed with the capabilities of the site.

Welcome Kayakado

The new site, which will be going live within the next week, will allow you to print out your bookshelf and your recipe search results.  We don't yet have an export data feature but hope to add that in the future.

So glad to hear you are impressed with EYB - I think you will be even more impressed with the new version.  You can see a preview now.