Forum

Hello. 

I am a fairly new member here, and I just finished adding (almost) every cookbook I own on my bookshelf. I own almost 1300 cookbooks (yeah I know I have a problem), and quite a number of them arenßt indexed here. I really would like to start indexing books myself, and I already requested to do it about a week ago, but so far nobody got back to me. Is there any special requirement?

Regards

Hi VampirLestat - you made two requests to index books yesterday. I cannot see any other requests to index books though Sydney can weigh in when she starts work (she is in a different time zone). And you only joined EYB 3 days ago so you wouldn't have been able to make index requests a week ago.

You can expect a response within 24 hours of a request to index a book so I'm sure you will hear from Sydney today. We do ask in the pop-up that appears after you click that you want to index a book, that you only request to index one book at a time. And not request to index another book until you have submitted the first one.

Hi and welcome. Wow, you certainly been busy adding all those books for joining just recently.  Glad to see another person with extensive book collection.  You can add notes to the recipes made here too. I often use the notes I made to repeat the favorite recipes and get inspiration from other members' notes. 

Sorry VampirLestat, I wasn't trying to put you on the spot, just trying to clarify what had happened as I couldn't see how we had let you down. We try to be very responsive to our members, responding to Forum posts and emails the same day. I understand from Sydney that she has now contacted you regarding your requests.

Hey Vamp....having been an EYB patron since the very beginning, I can assure you Jane and Fiona provide extraordinary customer service. Please realize there are literally thousands of us using this wonderful service (I have over 1600 books listed) and we do all we can to help these wonderful owners continue to make our cooking life easier. You may be in a real hurry to "come up to speed", having discovered the possibilities of EYB, but WAIT. Your offer to index "for free" is nice, but your tone is not. Please reconsider all of us who are part of the EYB family, and how we all would like immediate personal service. It's just not in the cards. Have a nice day.

Hi VampirLestat, welcome! I am impressed by your collection of recipe books (and envious). What a huge effort to add them all so quickly! EYB will certainly make a large difference, I am sure. I use it almost daily.

I am also one of the large group of members who volunteer to index books (and I also add page numbers to books where they were not originally added). I find it very enjoyable, and it allows me to focus in on the contents of a cookbook in a way that we don't usually tend to do. I hope you enjoy it too.

I look forward to seeing you regularly in the forums and hearing about your indexing experiences.

 Welcome, Vamp.  I think you'll enjoy the ridel  Worst outcome?  You'll find all aout these wonderful books everybody else seems to have and, next thing you know, you have to build more bookshelves in your house...or garage...or attic.

Welcome on board Vampir! EYB is a marvelous resource .. I was in the same boat when I joined EYB back in the dim distant past (2011). Very few of my books were indexed so I too chipped in. Whilst indexing can be tiresome, it does while away cold evenings and you get to know your books far better than you ever did before! On average books tend to have around 100 recipes, and in my keying skills (non-existent) I get around 25 recipes done in an hour (if I focus). Looking at your profile page, and your library, sorted by indexed books just over three quarters of your collection is indexed. So once you get the indexing bug you'll soon have it done ...or will you - taking my example I'm 13 years in and still have only three quarters indexed! Trouble is I keep adding books !! I use EYB every day without fail! 

I also like indexing my books. I'm wondering - maybe this is a question for Jane? Is there a reason we can't start indexing the next book while a current one is being reviewed? 

I always index for a few weeks or however long it takes, then submit and request a new book to index at the same time. But then there's a few weeks of waiting for the prior book to be approved before the new one is assigned. 

If we didn't have the waiting period between books, I'm sure we could get a lot of books indexed more quickly as a collective! 

I've started out indexing my missing cookbooks on EYB, so this explanation really helps me to understand why we need to take our time and try to ensure we've indexed as well as we can before submitting to Sydney for review.

I do wish we had added that at the start VampirLestat. By the time we had members requesting that feature, we had already indexed a lot of recipes and adding any new recipe features makes the recipe database split between those with the feature and those without. We do have that problem with page numbers. When we launched the site we felt page numbers would be confusing as different book editions can have different paginations and we felt it would be worse to have wrong page numbers than no page numbers. Page numbers for magazine recipes were added from the start. But after a while we decided that since the majority of books only have one edition we should add the numbers going forward. We hoped members who own the books indexed before that switch would add the missing page numbers (it's much quicker than indexing). Several members are doing that - hopefully more will!

So if we add cooking method as a category tag, how would members feel that 2.5 million recipes are indexed without the cooking method? I would say that any recipes indexed from books using an appliance usually have the appliance name in the book title. So a recipe search by "pressure cooker", "air fryer" or "sous vide" will show all recipes with those words in the book or recipe title.