Roughly how many physical cookbooks do you have, cdispoto? Are the majority of them 15 years old or newer? Do you use any e-book cookbooks now? Just trying to get a sense of how realistic the goal of completely "going digital" is for you.
Eat Your Books will help you use both physical and e-books more effectively, wherever you end up on the spectrum.
I use the ingredient-based approach a lot with EYB, but I use it almost as much to synthesize recipes across cookbooks. For example, say I want to make gingerbread, or a coleslaw dressing; EYB makes it much, much easier to see which books and magazines on my shelves have those recipes. Then it's a simple matter to get out those books, turn to the recipes, and after review either go with one of them or jot down in my cooking notebook a blended version (which is updated after the dish is made and consumed). This process has encouraged me to use cookbooks I hadn't touched for years before joining EYB, helped make decisions about culling, and resulted in many "keeper" recipes that I've entered as Personal Recipes in EYB (which can, unlike the public recipes available to all, contain ingredient quantities and directions).
In that sense, EYB has helped me create digital versions from my physical books. Another way to accomplish this, if you have a just a few favorite recipes in EYB-indexed books for which there isn't and may never be an e-book version, is to enter the recipes on a private Note (do remember to check the 'make this Note private' box, though, to avoid copyright issues).
Bookmarks are a huge help in organizing both recipes and books. I have bookmarks for the two physical locations for cookbooks in the house, for those that are in the local library (which EYB has made into something of an annex to my kitchen), those on the shelves of cooking friends, and wishlists, grouped by rough type (home/seasonal cooking, preserving, cuisines, reading interest). Wishlists/books of interest take up almost three-quarters of my Bookshelf; there are only about a hundred cookbooks actually sitting on my shelves.
Recipe bookmarks are even more crucial to using EYB effectively. Because they automatically display alphabetically, I developed a letter system to keep similar types grouped together: recipes of interest from specific cookbooks (c. + book title) -- a huge improvement over the old method using post-its; ingredient-based (i.pork shoulder, i.sweet potato, etc.), and recipe-based, for the kind of synthesizing mentioned above: r.gingerbread, etc.). There are z. bookmarks for recording personal experience/relationships with recipes: z.made, z.on deck, z.garden club picnic, etc.
Re: page numbers -- Indexed magazines have always had them, and I've noticed that EYB has recently begun to include page numbers when indexing newly published books. They weren't including page numbers previously, or with member indexed books even now, because of the existence of many different editions. An EYB staffer can speak with more confidence on the prospects for further page number provision. As with recipes, Notes can provide a workaround to include page numbers. If a Note I make consists entirely of a page number, I make it private. If it's to record my experience with cooking it, I leave the Note public, virtually always including the page number; it's been a real time-saver for my most repeated recipes.