Forum

I am so glad to have indexed all my cookbooks now.  I found that I had several repeats.  Now that I can access this website on my phone I can check before I buy.  

OK, yes, I perhaps have an embarrasing number of cookbooks. But I use them and enjoy them, so I'm unlikely to stop buying them any time soon. I also spend time reading cookbook reviews, cruising bookstores, checking out cookbooks on Amazon, and admiring my friends' cookbooks. The upshot is that when I'm in a store, I can't always remember which books I actually own vs. those I've studied in some other way. These days, unless it is newly released, I never buy a cookbook without first checking my EYB bookshelf to make sure I don't already own it. I can't count the number of times I would have made duplicate purchases without the help of EYB. For that reason, I only add a book to My Bookshelf if I actually own it. If I added library books, as some have suggested, I'd be more confused than I already am. Thank you Jane and Fiona for helping me keep up a semblance of sanity!!

Not being able to list non-ISBN books or cookbooks that don't appear in the EYB's library does present a distorted picture of our collections.  It seems to me there are good reasons to permit listing the other books we own such as finding out that 400 of us own a particular book and would like to have it indexed.  I'm not sure I understand why they can't be listed.  But then I can't imagine why you would list a book you didn't own, it owuld confuse the heck out of me.

hgourmet - the reason we have to restrict the Library to books with ISBN numbers is that is how we import the data from Amazon.  If the books does not have an ISBN number then we cannot retrieve the data.  We don't have the resources to find and add the data manually.  Though we do hope at some time in the future to set up a feature that would allow members to add the book data themselves.

As debkellie says, we will add the data manually for a book without an ISBN if the member wants to index it.  We would need title, subtitle (if any), author, publisher, country and date of publication, format, number of pages and a photo or scan of the book cover.