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.

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. 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?

This is a feature we didn't get time to finish before the launch of the new site. But it will work in the next few days. The speech balloon relates to the number of Notes that have been made by members. The heads and number relates to the number of bookshelves the book is on. When it works clicking on these will take you to the corresponding tab on the book details page. You can still see the tabs with the notes and details of who owns the book by clicking on the book title to go to book details.

Thanks Chris - I passed your comments on to our developers as I know they will be really pleased that they came from you.

That is odd - you should only get that message if we detect the IE6 browser. What browser do you use?

I can't replicate this - I used a MacBook with Firefox, Safari and Chrome and there was no overlapping issue. Can you do a hard refresh or remove cache as that may be the issue with your Mac?

We definitely plan to add alternative payment systems once we are out of beta. PayPal was a convenient system while we started up but we know that not everyone wants to use them. You can just pay by credit card through PayPal (as Kerry Beal mentioned), you don't need a PayPal account to use the service. The new version of the website will go live tomorrow. I would be really interested to know what existing EYB members think of it.

Glad to hear you managed to add the majority of your cookbooks - that has given you more than 25,000 recipes to search through in seconds. The books that you were not able to add, you should import the ISBNs using the Book Import feature and we will then add them to the Library when we set up further affiliations with booksellers stocking older and rarer books. The books will then automatically be added to your Bookshelf. The new version of the site, which should be up within a couple of weeks (bug testing like crazy at the moment) will allow you to do an abbreviated listing (title, author, ISBN) that you can print out. You cannot yet add books without ISBNs but that is on our to-do list after we get the new site up. Thank you so much for your offer of help. Even if you don't want to index your books, just giving feedback is really valuable to us.

Thanks Nathan - a loaner would be fine, as and when you have one available, and as we will just be indexing it it will be returned to you in good nick. And we may well feel tempted to invest.

Thank you Nathan for your well-reasoned response on why "Modernist Cuisine" will be a book rather than any other form of delivery. There is often the assumption that because a technology is old that it is not as good but in the case of cookbooks there is still a huge attachment to the physicality of the book. Particularly in the kitchen where technology is not yet flour and spills proof, unlike your wipe-clean pages. I also have a question for you. Will you supply review copies? We would love to index the book on Eat Your Books, a huge task, and if we can get an advance review copy we can have it indexed for when the book goes on sale.

We always welcome bug reports - if it's something already fixed in the upcoming new version we'll just tell you, if it's a new bug or suggested enhancement, we welcome the input. Unfortunately we don't use OCR due to the complex nature of cookbooks. We could do for just the recipe title but the categories and ingredient names don't leap off the page. E.g. a recipe for chicken dopiaza may have nothing in the recipe listing to indicate it is a Indian curry and a main course (all three categories we would enter) and the ingredient words we want are usually buried in other text. But we are going to investigate ways we might be able to automate more of the process so if you have any thoughts I'd welcome them. So at the moment it is all done by paid indexers, who are spread around the world, going through the physical book, recipe by recipe, manually entering the data. We are going to open up the indexing to member volunteers who will be able to index their own books, particularly the less "popular" ones that may not reach the top of our indexing queue for some time. We will still have to proofread the work - the quality of the data is critical and we know from even the paid indexers work how variable the quality can be. We now use mainly back-of-the-book cookbook indexers as they understand the importance of data integrity and have good culinary knowledge.