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I was pleased to discover your site as it aims to give access to the tried and true recipes in MY books. In desperation, I have been building my own spreadsheet of my favourite recipes. I already have over 1,000, and a few of my favourite books are now fully indexed. It's brilliant! :) but I'd prefer someone else to do the work of course :)

I have a couple of problems with your system as it stands though. Firstly searching by ingredients takes just ages. My spreadsheet has a macro in the header line which allows searching on any word(s) which occur in the column - say the ingredients column - and it's much quicker to find all the recipes I have which use those ingredients. Also I can't see how to browse the list of ingredients for a given recipe.

My really big problem is that you only have 2 of my 30 books! It isn't surprising that you didn't start with Australian cookery books, but you don't even have iconic Australians like Charmaine Solomon, Ian Parmenter, Gabriel Gate or Donna Hay. I did find an American edition of Stephanie Alexander's Cooks companion, but it's not my edition, and it seems unindexed as yet.

If this takes off, and I hope it does, could you let me know when you get down to the Antipodes and I'll give it another look? 

We absolutely do plan to expand the EYB Library to include more cookbooks from Australia and New Zealand.  But at this stage while we are still in development we are focusing on the USA.  However I don't feel like we have ignored Australian coobook authors. We have 13 Donna Hay books in the EYB Library, of which 7 are indexed.  There are 6 Charmaine Solomon books, of which one is indexed.  There are 3 Gabriel Gate and 4 Stephanie Alexander cookbooks, none indexed yet.  We have also indexed books by Neil Perry, Bill Granger, and David Thompson.

We can certainly let you know when we launch Down Under.  We will be adding a lot more international books to the EYB Library soon but in order for them to get indexed we would need a lot of members to own them and index request them.  That probably won't happen with Australian books until we have a lot more Australian members.

I don't understand why your ingredients searches are taking ages - you should get results in seconds.  Could you email me at [email protected] outlining what searches you were doing.  Also when you say you want to browse the ingredients, what exactly are you trying to do?  In your search results you can see all the ingredients for the recipes that contain your search criteria.  Do you then want to search further within those results?

Delighted to hear your searches are now performing as they should.  We will definitely be indexing more Australian books in the next few weeks.  And once we expand the EYB Library, which will happen in the next few weeks, you will be able to add any book you own to the Library, and so to your Bookshelf.