Many good cooks shop first for the ingredients that look freshest and best, then schlep them home. With EYB, I can use my smart phone to search for recipes that use whatever is appealing to me in the grocery store, and buy additional complementary ingredients I might not have in mind or on hand. This convenience matters. For example, I was facing beautiful pluots on special and remembered the Blue Chair Jam Cookbook had a recipe that called for them. Checking, I saw whilst still in the produce isle that it called also for strawberries. Bought strawberries and pluots.
It is just as useful in dealing with leftovers. This website has probably saved megatons of carbon from having been wasted as cooks DIDN'T have to run to the store for something but used leftovers in different ways. The comments in the recipes introduce me to recipes I have never tried. This is like discovering that your friend has a small country place in Tuscany you didn't know about, AND ARE WELCOME TO USE! We find new aspects of old friend cookbooks.
The filters make it convenient to sort according to cuisine you are hungering for. Got boiled up black beans and hankering for Indian? Put the beans in the ingredient box and filter for Indian.
The name of this website really is brilliant, because we do use it to eat our books. And remember, cooks are hands on people. I feel the pleasure of slicing a raw onion with my super sharp MAC knife up my arm and into my backbone. New cookbooks (or new to me used book treasures) are sensual pleasures to read cover to cover. (That's how I remembered the recipe for pluots above.) As a hands on person, the web only food sites are kinda sterile. I like the beat up besplattered cookbooks I can have relationships with. EYB enhances that relationship. And oddly for a tactile type, that electronic plasma enhances my pleasure of my sticky stash.