164 replies to this topic

[jane@eatyourbooks]

I have 4 books by Jamie Oliver (all UK editions)and their ISBN is not the main one listed but it is one of the ones that appear when you click the little link symbol. Is there a way to add/connect these to my indexed books?

We index just one copy of a book then link all other editions to it so the recipes are searchable no matter which edition you own. The display though still shows that the linked book is not indexed, which strictly speaking it isn't, but we want to improve that. We also want to combine notes, ratings and bookshelves for all editions. So on our to-do list we plan to make a better design for combining editions.

Where editions are going to be significantly different, like UK and US editions with the different ingredient names, we will end up indexing both editions. We have already done this for a few UK books such as Nigella's books and Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken... Jamie's books will also get done. Though for searching, it won't matter whether you search by UK or US ingredient names as we have linked them all e.g. search by zucchini and you will get recipes containing zucchini and courgettes.

PS I love the feature that shows how many people have the same book and I like to being able to browse through other people's collections!

I love it too - it's like browsing someone's bookshelves when you are in their house. Of course it doesn't help someone with serious cookbook addiction like me as I keep seeing cookbooks I want on people's bookshelves who have a lot of other books in common with me. Rationale being, if we both like all those books, then how come I don't have all these books?

[MaxH]

...for searching, it won't matter whether you search by UK or US ingredient names as we have linked them all e.g. search by zucchini and you will get recipes containing zucchini and courgettes.

-- also presumably vegetable marrows (common general UK cooking term for what US and Italy call zucchini, and related summer squashes).

Food has a lot of this international English inconsistency. Like the grain most of the English-speaking world calls maize, traditionally "corn" in North America only, outside which "corn" meant grain in general, though N. American sense is spreading. (Like the traditionally ambiguous "billion:" a million million outside US, but a thousand million inside, hence the phrase "thousand million" was long common in UK but not US; Europeans solved this with the unambiguous "milliard," rarely seen in US.) "Cornflour" is well established in British recipes (US "cornstarch"). "Porterhouse" steaks appear in both US and UK but are different, related, cuts. Beetroot (US "beet"), treacle, etc. Pudding (word with a glorious history evolving from sausages, lovingly detailed in Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food) in both US and UK denotes either certain cooked compositions or, in offshoot meanings, sweet dessert dishes, a more narrow custard type in US but a more general sense in UK. "French dressing" in UK still means what it does in most US cookbooks, until a few years ago (i.e. vinaigrette); creeping influence of sweet red commercial variants shifted US perception of that phrase, but not elsewhere. These are offhand examples of a big genre. (It's worse in German, by the way: One of my central-European cookbooks includes a valuable German to Austrian to Swiss food dictionary).

Alas, I again noticed the ISBN limitation, cooking recently from three much-used cookbooks. The 1960s "Fannie Farmer" (one of the most widely used of all 20th-c. US cookbooks and bearing, like many pre-ISBN US titles, a standard Library of Congress Catalog, or LCC, number -- sometimes cited in bibliographies); an edition of the inspiring and sometimes clarifying American Regional Cook Book; and the best-selling original Gourmet Cookbook, for its tips on international pot-roast nuances.

[edsel]

Thanks to whoever suggested the zbar app, I'm loving it!

I downloaded the zbar app, but decided to get a cheap barcode scanner instead. I bought a "de-clawed" CueCat off of eBay. Works like a charm.

If they ever decide to do an iPhone app for Eat Your Books, the barcode-scanning library used in the zbar app is open-source and freely available. Could be cool to have an option to upload books to your library...

[Kerry Beal]

Got hubby to declaw one of the USB Cuecats we had (let me just say what a handy guy he is!) and with a little trial and error I'm starting to get things scanned in.

Bit of a learning curve - realized you need to scan a little quicker than I had been - and if you get more than the right number of numbers - delete the extras off the end.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through one shelf. Only about 20 more shelves to go - then all the loose books lying around.

Glad it's only the cookbooks!

[OliverB]

I just signed up as a lifetimer too, can't beat that offer. I'm getting quite excited about this site, I've not cooked from a book in quite a while, it being summer and there being a big green egg and a weber outside, but for one, winter will come, and for two, I'm looking forward to trying something new for a change. I think this will get me using my books a lot more, that alone is worth the money! It's been often that I remember a recipe but have no clue which book (or magazine for that matter) it was in. Magazines I throw out after keeping one or the other recipe I want to make, and most can be found online, but I'm loving the idea behind this site!
Now I also have to see what that librarything thing is.
It'll take a while to enter all my books, and my German ones I won't even try, but just adding a handful already gives me thousands of recipes and ingredients, very very neat!

[nakji]

I am still, still trying to wade through the PayPal registration procedure to I can sign up for this site. I'm getting so hacked off at Paypal, my rage is beginning to bleed over to EYB. I have linked my bank account (took 3 days). I have linked my credit card (took another three days). Now Paypal is saying I have to transfer money from my bank account on to my Paypal balance (takes another 6 days - and I'm not confident that I'll be able to pay even once I've done that) as the only way to pay for the membership fee. Is this what everyone else has done? No word on why I can't use my credit card for the transaction, just a red balloon popping up every time saying I have to add funds to my balance. Which -it won't let me do via my credit card. Has everyone gone through this, and I am just stupid to think you should just be able to pay for something in one click online? Because it seems like everyone else has signed up so easily.

[blue_dolphin]

So sorry for your struggles. I am no Paypal expert. I just paid with my credit card. If I recall correctly, when using PayPal, I usually get a screen that lets me choose to either use a credit card or log in to PayPal.
I enter all my usual credit card and billing info and proceed.
Maybe I set something up in the deep dark past that allows me to do that?

Anyway, I really love this concept. I've got dozens of cookbooks on my shelves. Yet when I come home from the farmers' market or rummage up a few ingredients from the pantry, I've been searching online because I was too lazy to go book by book. I'd started to think I could no longer justify buying any more cookbooks because I just wasn't using them like I used to. So my subscription enables me to buy even more cookbooks!

[nickrey]

Is your credit card from an Asian bank Erin? This may possibly be an issue.

[nakji]

No, I have a Canadian Bank card and Canadian credit card linked to a Canadian bank account and have registered and verified both through Canadian Paypal. Also, my husband tried using his Paypal account, which he uses frequently for internet purchases, and we still kept getting the same error message. To be honest, I was beginning to think I was crazy - or missing some incredibly obvious point. After a series of increasingly pointed e-mails to Paypal customer service trying to locate the problem, I received this in reply:

Dear Erin Garnhum,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

I checked your account and I see that the payment you sent your credit
card was blocked by our internal security model. Each payment that is
sent through a PayPal account is reviewed when a sender initiates the
transaction. The account holder is then given the funding sources
available for that particular transaction. Some transactions may not
allow all types of funding sources to be available that is why you are
not seeing your credit card when you try to make this payment.

This is similar to the way banks and credit card companies work when
approving individual transactions online. Also, when a payment is
blocked, it is merely an indication that the individual transaction fits
a pattern that is out of the ordinary and observed in the past to have a
high risk of failure.

[...snip...]

Bolding mine. For whatever reason, Paypal was not happy with this transaction. The only thing I can think is that their "internal security model" noticed I was doing the transaction from a non-Canadian ISP and that ticked a box somewhere. Although I use my credit card in random, bizarre places all the time, and keep my bank constantly updated on the places it might see charges from routinely, of course Paypal doesn't have access to this information. Whatever the case, after this last e-mail from Paypal, the payment was suddenly, mysteriously accepted, without any direct confirmation from Paypal that they were now going to allow this transaction to go through.

So: long story short, I now appear to be registered. I started up my organic CSA again immediately after resolving this, with the hopes of using that in conjunction with EYB to make some tasty meals from my current cookbook collection. And I get to add more books (relatively) guilt-free now, since I know I can make better use of them.

Since I took out a lifetime membership, I won't have to deal with Paypal again, but I hope (out of pure cranky spite) EatYourBooks adds a direct payment method.

[OliverB]

well, entered all that the system recognized, a couple I could not find via author, title, or isbn. some others I found, but not the edition I have or I could not compare as only the 13 isbn was shown and my book only has a short one.
Sadly, so far only 84 of the 193 books I entered are indexed and of course I left all my German books out, but still, I think this will be a nice resource. Hopefully more will get indexed.

As a side note, sometimes the title did not bring up an entry, but title plus author did, or just author instead of title, etc. Sometimes title got me nothing but isbn did, sometimes vice versa. Also search does not seem to recognize unfinished words (like google does for example). The complete robu got me no result, robuchon did of course.

Just some things I noticed, and some books I simply could not find any which way, despite that they are US edition with isbn numbers.

Phew, that was a boring task, glad I'm done....

[Clark D]

Just wanted to thank the original poster and everyone else for putting this up here. Just signed up now for the lifetime membership. I'll enter all the books over the weekend! Thanks again this is a great find!

Clark

[nakji]

well, entered all that the system recognized, a couple I could not find via author, title, or isbn. some others I found, but not the edition I have or I could not compare as only the 13 isbn was shown and my book only has a short one.
Sadly, so far only 84 of the 193 books I entered are indexed and of course I left all my German books out, but still, I think this will be a nice resource. Hopefully more will get indexed.

As a side note, sometimes the title did not bring up an entry, but title plus author did, or just author instead of title, etc. Sometimes title got me nothing but isbn did, sometimes vice versa. Also search does not seem to recognize unfinished words (like google does for example). The complete robu got me no result, robuchon did of course.

Just some things I noticed, and some books I simply could not find any which way, despite that they are US edition with isbn numbers.

Phew, that was a boring task, glad I'm done....

A couple of my books are un-indexed yet - for example, Everyday Harumi, The Korean Table and Yan Kit-So's Classic Chinese Cooking. Because they're regional books, I guess it'll take a while before they get indexed. It seems like, however, according to their forums, that they will be opening up a service where members can start to index things themselves - including their own family recipe cards and magazine clippings. That's some big appeal, there - I look forward to that coming out.


I spent yesterday going through the recipes in my favourite books and tagging them with "bookmarks". I geekily love this sort of thing - my tags, along with "Favourites" are "made", "made and liked", and "want to try". I was trying to come up with some more useful tags - I might start to tag regionally as well. I also starred and commented on as many recipes as I had something relevant to say on. The "friend" function has also gone on the current site, but will apparently come back. I hoping that when it does, there's some intelligence so that you can see how trusted commenters/raters are - right now the stars are aggregate, I think, but it would be nice to know that when "kittychef47" says "This dish is good" what kind of person is saying that. Sites like Hostelworld do this so that you can match your profile to other members and know whose comments you're most likely to trust.

I did, in my travels, notice some errata - for example, the recipe for stir-fried pork and green peppers in Fuschia Dunlop's Revolutionary Cooking is indexed as having Cornish Game hens as an ingredient. On a suspicion, I thought perhaps it might have called for chicken stock, and the index was referring back to a recipe for that, but on reading the recipe, that was not the case. No Cornish Game hens, no chicken stock. Now, I've made the dish before, so I know there's no chicken in it, but if I had a couple of Cornish Game hens I was looking for something to do with, that search result would throw me for a loop. I noticed several other recipes in the same book doing the same thing.

Actually, I spent the whole Saturday afternoon geeking out with the site- and I only have about 20 cookbooks. I can imagine if I had to add more than a hundred books how daunting the task would be. I did notice that the most commonly owned book on the site - is this correct? - is Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I wonder how many people regularly cook from it?

[Clark D]

Put in 30 books so far and only 15 are indexed. Anybody else having this problem? I didn't think the books were really old or rare......


Clark

[nakji]

I think it depends on people's collections. Like I said, my books are kind of quirky, since I cook a lot of regional cuisine - so a couple of books I use quite regularly are not indexed, but a few others that I hardly ever use have already been indexed. Six out a total of twenty books in my collection haven't been indexed yet, but I'm taking a long view. Eventually they will be indexed, either by the site or myself, if they open that up to members. I've requested an index on all that are not yet indexed.

[nickrey]

Put in 30 books so far and only 15 are indexed. Anybody else having this problem? I didn't think the books were really old or rare......


Clark

My equivalent to that is 60 out of 270 (or 22%). At 50% you seem way ahead. My total also does not include many books whose ISBN were not recognised.

According to the website, they have indexed 1344 books so far. If you think about the amount of work indexing one book alone, this is going to be a long-term project.

All that aside, I now have access to 14,417 indexed recipes in a form that makes them so much more accessible.

The site is still in beta with modifications to software and further indexing to occur prior to it coming off beta.

Like Nakji, I'm taking a very long term view of this site which is already giving me a lot of return.

[Clark D]

For sure! I did sign up for the lifetime. Just wondering what kind of rates everyone else was getting! I imagine we'll have to put in a lot of them ourselves, we all probably have a few weird ones.

I ended up entering all of my books today. I had 123 books.
62 are in the system but not indexed (8 of those shouldn't be since they are more reference type books so I did not request the indexing of those....)
41 are indexed
16 are not in the system at all

Works out to 35% (removing the ones that shouldn't be indexed)

Looking forward to using the program!

Clark

[pkeibel]

For the record

106 cookbooks
96 in the system (90%)
55 were indexed (52%)

But those not in the system and the vast majority of those not indexed (except about 5) I rarely use

[janeer]

146 books entered, 54 indexed (just under 37 percent; this is actually huge growth from when I first registered, when they had barely a handful of my books indexed). How do you know if something is "in the system"? by whether there is a photo or not? If so, a large portion of my books are not in the system. And many of them are classics. Some books I could never enter, no matter how many different ways I tried to search.

Still. A search for baby artichokes turned up some sources I would not have initially looked to. Overall, I am cautiously optimistic.

[viva]

Just signed up for the free trial to see how it worked - Greatest Website EVER! Of 89 cookbooks, 83 are in their database and 59 are indexed.

[baroness]

146 books entered, 54 indexed (just under 37 percent; this is actually huge growth from when I first registered, when they had barely a handful of my books indexed). How do you know if something is "in the system"? by whether there is a photo or not? If so, a large portion of my books are not in the system. And many of them are classics. Some books I could never enter, no matter how many different ways I tried to search.

Still. A search for baby artichokes turned up some sources I would not have initially looked to. Overall, I am cautiously optimistic.

So far, I have 308 books on my EYB bookshelf; only 65 of those (that's 21%) are indexed. Another 56 books aren't in their library, and I have countless older and foreign texts that lack ISBNs. About 6 boxes of older books to go...I'm trying to be optimstic!

[Chris Hennes]

While all these statistics are interesting, I'd caution everyone to actually use the site for a while before passing judgement based on how few of your titles are indexed. Even only searching half my cookbook collection, I have still managed to come up with dinner options every single time I've used it. Of course I'd love to have more books in there, but I personally find their focus on quality over quantity admirable. Of course there are still some mistakes, but one can only imagine how hard it must be to get these hundreds of thousands of recipes entered manually and relatively error-free!

[nakji]

While all these statistics are interesting, I'd caution everyone to actually use the site for a while before passing judgement based on how few of your titles are indexed. Even only searching half my cookbook collection, I have still managed to come up with dinner options every single time I've used it. Of course I'd love to have more books in there, but I personally find their focus on quality over quantity admirable. Of course there are still some mistakes, but one can only imagine how hard it must be to get these hundreds of thousands of recipes entered manually and relatively error-free!

One thing I find interesting is the results it's turned up for me when I used it this week. Because I have so few books, and because "How to Cook Everything" represents such a large percentage of my total number of recipes, every search I've run this week has turned up two or three recipes from that book that I had never noticed before. It's essentially a book I bought so I'd have some sort of resource for recipe basics like pancakes, roast chicken, legs of lamb, yogurt...now I'm taking a second look at it. Some pasta recipes came up that looked decent. It's not an exciting cookbook, but it works for a weeknight.

[Kayakado]

I like the stats showing how many others have a particular book in their library. Right now Mastering the Art of French Cooking sits on 666 bookshelves besides mine.

[faith]

Hear, hear on the actually using it. The second time I took a spin through eyb to figure out dinner, I found a recipe for lamb shoulder with apples and pomegranate molasses in Paula Wolfert'ss Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean that is now one of my favorites (for the next time I have lamb shoulder in the house, of course). Since I live in the country (I'm not allowed to call it the middle of nowhere...), I had the added fun of making pomegranate molasses (for which Wolfert provides a recipe that I'd also never have noticed without assistance).

Edit: Just to clarify: I like the country/middle of nowhere....

Edited by faith, 15 September 2010 - 11:02 AM.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

Sorry, I haven't been keeping up with all the latest comments. For reasons unknown my email alerts from eG haven't been coming through and I've been completely bogged down with the indexing interface we are writing. Eventually this will become the form that will allow members to index their own books and personal recipes. This should get over some of the issues people have with the percentage of their books being indexed. We hope that if a lot of people decide to participate in indexing then you will see your recipe count going up quickly without you necessarily having to index them all yourself.

But as Chris H. said, the important thing is actually to use the search and you will be amazed at how many recipes you already have, even if it's only a fraction of the books you own. About 30% of my own cookbooks are indexed and I am often stunned at how many recipes I can find for an ingredient. The key then is to use the filters to whittle down the results to something manageable.

If there are books you own that are not in the Library, enter the ISBN (if it has one) in the Data Import feature and when we expand our affiliates soon we will add those books to the Library. If you have requested that book it will automatically go onto your Bookshelf. We will be expanding the data fields so you can add books and magazines without ISBNs.

There will be some errors on the data entry. It is a manual process and initially we were using students whose culinary knowledge wasn't great. We have now vastly improved our indexing staff (a lot of them are back-of-the-book cookbook indexers) and we are proofreading the data from the early books. But if you spot an error, please just click Report an error at the bottom of the page and we will correct it.

Finally, when we come out of Beta and stop the lifetime membership offer, we will be completely changing the registration and payments process (so no more PayPal). We will be opening up the site so anyone can view and search individual books and recipes but you will need to be a member to create a Bookshelf i.e. to search your own books for recipes.

[MaxH]

well, entered all that the system recognized, a couple I could not find via author, title, or isbn. some others I found, but not the edition I have or I could not compare as only the 13 isbn was shown and my book only has a short one.... Just some things I noticed, and some books I simply could not find any which way, despite that they are US edition with isbn numbers.

Jane, OliverB's experience raises a couple of related questions about books with multiple or non-ISB numbers.

Far more books in current use have 10- than 13-digit ISBNs, the latter being relatively recent. I've noticed that books in print since before 2007 (when ISBN-13 took over) often list both (sometimes the two numbers look related, though I don't think that's guaranteed) as in Oliver's experience above. So I wonder if you permit more than one ISBN when they exist, or (similar question) linking ISBNs for books reprinted identically by different publishers or at different times (I know some popular examples -- one classic Chez Panisse cookbook for instance) -- all of which would resolve Oliver's situation.

Related: Before book numbers went international (the I in ISBN) there were some longstanding national catalogings. For decades before ISBN's advent, US books carried unique Library of Congress Catalog (LCC) numbers filling a similar role. That describes most US books I have that are pre-ISBN. That would be another natural number to allow for (and again, books may have both LCC and ISB numbers or if they stay in print, may start with an LCC and have an ISBN added later).

[jane@eatyourbooks]

All books with ISBN 10-digit numbers also have an ISBN 13-digit number. The 13 digit has 978 at the front of the 10 with a different balancing number as the last digit. ISBN has a different formula for the last digit of the 10 and 13 digit numbers which checks that the other digits are all correct. So if you look on the Book details page on EYB you will see both the 10 and 13 digit numbers listed and you can see they are basically the same apart from the first three and last one number.

When you import ISBN data using the Import Books feature you can import either 10 or 13-digit ISBNs - we recognize both. The same when you are searching the Library for a book - you can put either the 10 or 13-digits in the search box.

We do link many different editions/ISBNs of the same book - you can see what they are by clicking the links symbol under the book title. The books can be different formats, different publishers, different countries, even slightly different titles - they just have to have the same recipes. So we don't link revised or updated editions where the recipes have been changed.

We will be using the LCC numbers for pre-ISBN American books and will use other national ID numbers as required for international books.

[nakji]

There will be some errors on the data entry. It is a manual process and initially we were using students whose culinary knowledge wasn't great. We have now vastly improved our indexing staff (a lot of them are back-of-the-book cookbook indexers) and we are proofreading the data from the early books. But if you spot an error, please just click Report an error at the bottom of the page and we will correct it.

Thanks. I hadn't noticed that link on the bottom of the page before. I can't imagine the task of having to proof-read other people's indexing. Thinking about it makes my eyes cross.

[nickrey]

Bump.

Just got a mail out from Jane at Eat Your Books that included the following information:

We will shortly be introducing a new registration and payment system, including a monthly subscription. Lifetime memberships continue to be available until then. And if you're stuck for present ideas for cookbook loving friends we'll be launching Gift Subscriptions in time for the holidays.

If you were delaying getting a lifetime subscription, time is running out.

I'm still using it a lot by the way.

[nakji]

Me too. Recently, it's come in handy with chestnuts, Thai basil, and a Sunday pork loin with an utter lack of inspiration.