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I'll probably write an article about this site later (may try to contact one of the folks behind it first).
If you are a cookbook junkie as I am, you may have run into this problem before: you've got so many recipes on hand that you don't even know where to begin to look for a good new recipe for, say, that red cabbage in your fridge. So you end up foregoing the cookbooks and googling "red cabbage" instead.
Eat Your Books is a site which promises to make cookbook lovers lives easier. Input a list of books on your shelf, and be able to search for any recipe contained within them featuring the ingredient(s) and other factors of your choosing.
Sounds totally awesome. I signed up for a monthly membership right away.
My problem? I tried inputting about 130 cookbooks from my collection yesterday and was quite disappointed.
84 of them were listed on the site (the rest aren't, mostly older out of print books I inherited, but still love). But only 12 of those are indexed by recipe on the site yet. That's not really a good representation or sampling of what recipes I have on hand to use. :(
I understand this is a huge project and they are literally entering ingredient info into a database by hand (recipe names, featured ingredients, and basic info only to avoid copyright issues). But I dislike that the focus is so heavy on the "celebrity chef" genre so far based on what's been uploaded - that is, you can find almost any book by Rachael Ray (gag), Mario Batalli, Bobby Flay etc that you want; less "trendy" yet still classic titles are much harder to find indexed except for certain standards like Joy of Cooking. They say that more and more are being added soon, and if you request indexing of a title, that should push it up the list if other people also request it. Yet I cringe when I see titles like "The Sopranos Family Cookbook" (which I have thanks to Dr. D but truly sucks) listed as "indexed soon" when there are so many great Italian cookbooks likely to never be "popular" enough to get indexed.
Eventually, users are supposed to be able to assist by indexing books they have on hand, which is great and I would absolutely volunteer some time to help out with that.
But in the meantime, Eat Your Books isn't all that useful to me. I have a HUGE collection of Italian cookbooks from all different regions/styles/specific ingredients...yet basically only my Marcella Hazan 3-4 books are indexed, plus 2 or 3 others, which makes me :( So I'll give $2.50 a month to Eat Your Books for now, but really want to see them expand to get more titles added (or user-end functionality) soon before investing more than that into the site....
If you are a cookbook junkie as I am, you may have run into this problem before: you've got so many recipes on hand that you don't even know where to begin to look for a good new recipe for, say, that red cabbage in your fridge. So you end up foregoing the cookbooks and googling "red cabbage" instead.
Eat Your Books is a site which promises to make cookbook lovers lives easier. Input a list of books on your shelf, and be able to search for any recipe contained within them featuring the ingredient(s) and other factors of your choosing.
Sounds totally awesome. I signed up for a monthly membership right away.
My problem? I tried inputting about 130 cookbooks from my collection yesterday and was quite disappointed.
84 of them were listed on the site (the rest aren't, mostly older out of print books I inherited, but still love). But only 12 of those are indexed by recipe on the site yet. That's not really a good representation or sampling of what recipes I have on hand to use. :(
I understand this is a huge project and they are literally entering ingredient info into a database by hand (recipe names, featured ingredients, and basic info only to avoid copyright issues). But I dislike that the focus is so heavy on the "celebrity chef" genre so far based on what's been uploaded - that is, you can find almost any book by Rachael Ray (gag), Mario Batalli, Bobby Flay etc that you want; less "trendy" yet still classic titles are much harder to find indexed except for certain standards like Joy of Cooking. They say that more and more are being added soon, and if you request indexing of a title, that should push it up the list if other people also request it. Yet I cringe when I see titles like "The Sopranos Family Cookbook" (which I have thanks to Dr. D but truly sucks) listed as "indexed soon" when there are so many great Italian cookbooks likely to never be "popular" enough to get indexed.
Eventually, users are supposed to be able to assist by indexing books they have on hand, which is great and I would absolutely volunteer some time to help out with that.
But in the meantime, Eat Your Books isn't all that useful to me. I have a HUGE collection of Italian cookbooks from all different regions/styles/specific ingredients...yet basically only my Marcella Hazan 3-4 books are indexed, plus 2 or 3 others, which makes me :( So I'll give $2.50 a month to Eat Your Books for now, but really want to see them expand to get more titles added (or user-end functionality) soon before investing more than that into the site....