EatYourBooks.com: search your own cookbooks for recipes online

[Kerry Beal]

The new version has launched - but on my Mac everything is overlapped and I can't seem to login now.

[nakji]

I wonder if that's why the site keeps on telling me that I'm using Internet Explorer 6, which is not supported. As if I'd use IE /scoff/.

[blue_dolphin]

Hopefully that was a temporary glitch. I took a quick look and was able to log in just fine with the 2 browsers that I use (Safari and Camino)

[Chris Amirault]

Fine on my Droid and on Firefox/Windows XP. Will check my Firefox on my Mac tonight.

[Kerry Beal]

Fired up OK on safari on the mac where I'm working today - will have to see if it was a temporary glich when I get home.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

The new version has launched - but on my Mac everything is overlapped and I can't seem to login now.

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?

[jane@eatyourbooks]

I wonder if that's why the site keeps on telling me that I'm using Internet Explorer 6, which is not supported. As if I'd use IE /scoff/.

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

[Chris Hennes]

It works fine on my Mac (Safari and Firefox) and my iPhone (though admittedly it's hard to use on that tiny screen). Looks great on the big one, though, excellent work! I like the AJAX-ification of the search, the site feels very responsive.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

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

[torakris]

Fired up OK on safari on the mac where I'm working today - will have to see if it was a temporary glich when I get home.

It probably was an initial glitch. I had the exact same problem on my mac when the site just came back online. It looks great now.

It really sucks being on the other side of the world, I only managed to get 49 books uploaded on Monday and was hoping to finish them yesterday (my day off) and the site was offline all day for me..

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

[Kerry Beal]

Looks good at home now - must have been just an early morning glitch as Kristin suggested.

[nakji]

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

Firefox. It seems sorted now - must have been that glitch. I had recently updated my browser, too.

[Chris Amirault]

Jane, can you help me understand something? I can't quite figure out what the speech balloon (notes?) and the dual heads (bookshelves?) are for in this shot:

Nothing happens when I click on them. However, if I click on the links, I get a dropdown menu of ISBN numbers for previous editions, so I'm assuming something ought to happen! Can you only get access to those two features within the book page itself?

Edited September 2, 2010 by Chris Amirault
clarification -- (log)

[jane@eatyourbooks]

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.

[torakris]

I finally got all my books uploaded and I noticed that quite a few that I assumed would have been indexed were listed on my bookshelf as not indexed yet. For an example 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?

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!

[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....