8 replies to this topic

[lagoldberg8397]

What websites allow you to put personal cookbook collections online? I know about Eat Your Books and Gobbeldybook. Are there others? Favorites?

Edited by lagoldberg8397, 29 March 2011 - 10:28 AM.

[abadoozy]

But they don't really put your cookbooks online, do they? They're just online indexes. Definitely nice to have, but I'd much rather have the whole book. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen unless copyright law vastly changes... or you buy the electronic version of the book and host it somewhere.

[lagoldberg8397]

My apologies if I wasn't clear enough. I meant a site that either lets you list the cookbooks in your collection and/or indexes the recipes like Eat Your Books does. Being able to list cooking magazines would be an added bonus.

[Chris Hennes]

I personally use EYB, and like it a lot. They don't have a lot of my more esoteric books indexed yet, but the index they do have is a good one.

[minas6907]

Hmmmm, these are interesting sites. What I've been doing (ever since I've noticed my copy of "The Professional Pastry Chef" has been showing its age and is getting tattered) is everytime I want a recipe from any of my books, I just scan the pages I need to .jpg's on my laptop, crop them in photoshop so they arent crooked or anything, then just print them, and if I need them again, I can just print them again rather then making another copy from the book (none of my cook books make it into the kitchen, working off of scanned pages keeps the books clean). By now I have just under 200 scans of recipes organized into categories (Breads, Cheesecakes, Confections, Cookies, Ice Creams, Sorbets, and Misc) Has been working fine for me. I also make some excel spread sheets of recipes I commonly use and keep a copy of that in a plastic sleeve in the kitchen.

Edited by minas6907, 09 April 2011 - 10:36 PM.

[baca008]

I personally use eat your book. Like the index feature, as it really helps finding recipes if the books are indexed. Hoping that they'd index modernist cuisine soon. Its a beast of a book.

[RobertCollins]

I too have EYB but I find that over half of my collection isn't even recognized by ISBN or LOC or at all in EYB. I really want a list and really don't want to have to type all that info in by hand.

So what to do? I really like the bar scanner EYB uses and can't help but think that my simple list has to be able to be made by some other program that will link to the ISBN or Library of Congress number or something. Any suggestions?

I have just shy of 40 linear feet of cookbook collection and really would like to have a list of what I own.

Oh, it is worth noting that I think that EYB is way beyond cool. Using it has forced me to find my books to make recipes from books that hadn't been open in ten plus years. That I find worth every penny of my investment.

What programs will do the listing and look-ups for it using the above mentioned Scans and shortened typing ?

edit: Oh why didn't I pay attention in 7th grade grammar?

Edited by RobertCollins, 28 October 2011 - 09:12 PM.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

Thanks Robert - I like "way beyond cool". We do plan to add all the requested books to the EYB Library so if you have imported the ISBNs using the Import Books feature, then they will be added. But it is taking us far longer than we would like. The metadata we get from Amazon is title, author, publisher, date of publication and book cover (there may be gaps in some of these). So we have to add book type, ethnicity and other categories as well as correcting the numerous errors. We are only just managing to keep pace with new requests but we have a huge backlog to clear so I think we may just do a bulk import of everything with the data incomplete and try to catch up with the corrections and additions over time. At least then members will be able to add all their books to their EYB Bookshelves.

well, I say, all their books, but in fact there are some books that members have requested for which we can't find the data in Nielsen, Amazon or WorldCat. So we plan to create an "add your own books" feature that will allow you to add books without ISBNs or for which we cannot find the data. If you have the book right there, then it's easy for you to add title, author, publisher, etc as well as categorizing it.

So eventually the EYB Library should cover all food and drink books in the English language that our members own. I wonder how many that will be?

[Jon Tseng]

I use Librarything - click the link in my sig.

Obviously it doesn't index books like EYB but it lets me keep track of what books I have don't (useful in the bookstore sometimes!).

EYB looks very interesting but I'm a bit put off by the subscription-based payment. Librarything are (or at least were at the time) dumb enough to offer a one-off lifetime membership payment...

J