jane@eatyourbooks

JoNorvelleWalker - if you would like an Excel spreadsheet of your Bookshelf, email us. Make sure you have added all the books you own to your Bookshelf before you request it - it's not something I can do repeatedly.

Hi chefmd - Eat Your Books has a free option as well. In fact you can search our database of 1.6 million recipes without even being a member. You need to be a member to create your own Bookshelf - for a free member that is up to 5 cookbooks/magazines and unlimited online recipes or with a Premium paid membership you can add as many cookbooks and magazines to your Bookshelf as you own.

Wow, I wish they had told us that! Have they given any reason for it? Yes, we can assign the index for the book to any member who would like to add the missing recipes and they can add them to the end of the current index. Is there an alpha index for each of the 5 volumes so members can easily find the recipes in Vol 5? I hadn't realized there was no alpha index in the Kitchen Manual so presumably it would also be very useful if the person who did this also added the KM page numbers in EYB comments. A labor of love!

Apologies for the delay in my responses to questions here, though it looks like other members have been doing a great job answering them - thanks! Okanagancook - Firstly, thank you so much for adding Notes for your Recipes. This really increases the value of EYB for all members. Your problem is actually a browser issue, not something we at EYB can overcome easily. For example on Firefox the back button takes you back to where you were, but on IE you go back to the start. What I suggest you do is open a new browser tab each time you go to a details page to add Notes. On IE you do that by holding down the CTRL key and clicking the link. If you use a different browser you will need to check in Help how to do it. Then when you have finished adding Notes and ratings for that recipe, close that tab and you are back on the search results exactly where you left it, as you never actually moved from that tab. You are right, it should be possible to do that. We are completely reworking the shopping list when we design the smartphone interface for the site, which is our next big project. The shopping list will then be editable and can be emailed or texted. We weren't sent the entire 6 volumes (sadly), just the Kitchen Manual which should contain all the recipes that appear anywhere in the other 5 volumes. There isn't an alpha index for the manual but looking through the chapter listing at the front I couldn't see any Onion gratins listed. I wonder whether they accidentally missed it out? When you are using the 5 volumes is there a reference to the page number in the Kitchen Manual? If so, what page does it say it is on? On the points about adding magazines to your Bookshelves. We are working our way back through the more popular magazines such as Gourmet and Bon Appètit. We have indexed all of Cook's Illustrated back to when they started in 1992. As Bad Rabbit suggests, it is a good idea to add to your Bookshelf the magazines you know you like, even if you don't subscribe, as so many of the recipes have Recipe Online links. For example the Observer Food Monthly from the UK has great recipes from Heston, Fergus Henderson, Nigel Slater, David Chang, Fuchsia Dunlop, etc and every one is linked back to their site for the full recipe.

I would think that a lot of these suggestions would be intimidating to a 20-something with little cooking experience who presumably in under time pressures. I would try to ease her in gently with books that have helpful explanations and maybe photos to help her understand the processes and the final dish. There is a good beginner's book from Phaidon 'What to Cook and How to Cook It' by Jane Hornby - good step-by-step photos but not too basic or simplistic. The new 'Cook's Illustrated Cookbook' - over 2,000 recipes from 20 years of the magazine - has no photos but good explanations. Finally, it would be worth taking a look at Ina Garten, Ellie Krieger or Alton Brown. I know these Food Network authors aren't in the league of Marcella, Jacques and Julia but they are much more approachable for someone young and new to cooking.

Wow, mm84321, your presentation and photos are awe-inspiring. For anyone who doesn't yet own the book but would like to know more about it, we have just indexed it on Eat Your Books http://bit.ly/vWufoE. It's worth a look - 376 recipes and many of them have over 30 ingredients (and we don't list the basics). I'm looking forward to getting the book back from the indexer though for me it will be more a good read than to cook from, spare time being what I'm lacking these days. One of the best meals of my life was at EMP and I can see why when you see from the book the time, effort and expense that goes into every single dish.

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?

It took longer than we would have liked but Eat Your Books has now indexed Modernist Cuisine. 714 astounding recipes for which we had to add 144 new ingredients! Mainly chemicals but also veal jowl fat, Douglas fir buds, pigeon blood. http://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/80695/modernist-cuisine-the-art-and [Moderator note: The original "Modernist Cuisine" by Myhrvold, Young & Bilet topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: "Modernist Cuisine" by Myhrvold, Young & Bilet (Part 2)]

Even though I have several other ice cream books that I love (Perfect Scoop, Passion for Ice Cream, Ices: The Definitive Guide) I do want to get this one based on the fantastic Lemon cream ice cream I made from a recipe on Food52. I like her techniques such as adding cornflour and cooling the mix in a freezer bag dunked in an ice bath. The texture was amazing, so soft and smooth. Based on all the plaudits above I think it's worth adding to my collection.

For anyone who keeps back issues of magazines, you might be interested that we are now indexing magazines as well as cookbooks at Eat Your Books. We have indexed all of Cooks Illustrated (right back to 1992), have done the last 2 years of all the other major food mags, and will be going back further for those magazines that are most popular. Many of the magazines have links to online recipes so even if you don't own the magazine, you can add it to your Bookshelf and have access to most of the recipes. Also, we are indexing British and Australian as well as American (and will also be doing NZ's Cuisine, Snadra. Eventually you will be able to search through all of your magazines at once.

I've been putting off posting here as who likes to own up to an addiction? But I feel like I'm among fellow addicts (or at least some of you are) so I'll stand up and announce "Hi, my name is Jane and I'm a cookbook addict. I own 1,098 books but I'm still adding more". The point of this support group wasn't that we had to go cold turkey was it? My most recent purchases have been Nigel Slater's Tender 2, Grace Young's Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge and Best Food Writing 2010. So now I'm having to own up every time I get another fix, aren't I?

mig - I would second LindaK on Rozanne Gold's books. Someone else to look at is Ellie Krieger - she has a couple of cookbooks So Easy and The Food You Crave. Both health-focused but also good recipes. On the topic of great new books published this year, I disagree with janeer who thought this was a dry year. There haven't been a lot of glossy chefs' books, apart from Noma, but in terms of great books for home cooks it has been a stellar year. Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan, One Big Table by Molly O'Neill, and The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser are all huge tomes with very cookable recipes. Other books full of recipes you want to cook rather than just read are Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi, Heart of the Artichoke by David Tanis, In the Kitchen With a Good Appetite by Melissa Clark, Tender II by Nigel Slater. Lots of good baking and desserts books too - Ready for Dessert by David Lebovitz, Flour by Joanne Chang, Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito and Sarabeth's Bakery by Sarabeth Levine.

You might be interested Mjx that Noma needed the most number of new ingredients added to our ingredients database out of any of the 1,400 cookbooks we have indexed. 81 new ingredients in 95 recipes even though we have 7,700 ingredients listed already. For comparison Alinea needed 32 and A Day at El Bulli 29. If you want to look at the recipe listings (names and ingredients) you can at http://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/80266/noma-time-and-place-in Interestingly Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy which we have just indexed is number 2 to Noma with 55 new ingredients, including black iguana, chapulines (grasshoppers), chicatanas (flying ants) and rayada wasp nest. Makes Noma's bulrushes and sea buckthorn juice seem tame.

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.

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.