Sorry you got that impression! I thought we were pretty clear with:
The core of Eat Your Books is an extensive reference database of the contents of over 160,000 cookbooks and food magazines. It won’t show you any actual recipe … Instead, you can search for the name of a dish or ingredient and see matching recipes that come from the books you own.
and
When I click a recipe that looks good, Eat Your Books presents me with the cookbook and the page number on which it appears, along with a list of ingredients so I can make sure I have them all on hand.
Thank you for the clarification. So, what I get from this is that the site is an index to a number of recipe books and websites with a minority of sites that offer free downloads to have accessible recipes from your site. If a book or magazine is subscription based you have to purchase the subscription to get the recipe or buy the book if it is a book.
Its primary use seems to be an available recipe index to recipe books and magazines you already own becoming fee based if you wish to create a personal library larger than 5 items as opposed using your sites search engine to find the location of recipes in your own physical library.
Kindly correctly me if I am mistaken that this essence it is a tool of convenience, of having a ready-made index covering the publications of publications you already own and paying a fee for life for using this convenience if you own more than 5 publications that you wish to have included in the index. If a publication you own which you wish to index is not already included, the user needs to manually add that index, one recipe at a time to your database; then pay for the privilege of using it if you wish to have more than 5 publications accessible; with the exception being the limited number or recipes that are already in your database that are offered for free by their respective websites.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this comes across to me as asking existing users to volunteer and pay for the privilege of improving your website by indexing their own publications that are currently not included, which benefits your other users and subscription base, while your company reaps profits from the contributing users time and efforts with no compensation for it.
Additional Thoughts and Experience: I just searched your index for a couple of recipe books I already own. They are indexed and list the name of the recipes but no page number and no way of downloading the recipes with the only option available being to buy the book that I already own. If I need to access the recipe, I need to find the book in my collection, and find the recipe in the books’ own index, which I would be doing without your website. If I wanted to print the recipe so as to not risk soiling the book when cooking, I would have to write it out by hand or scan the recipe page and print it. So exactly how is your website helpful to me in such instances?
If you are a Free member and you index one of your cookbooks, it is added to your limit of 5. Your view is that we are exploiting members who spend time indexing their own cookbooks. Our view is that we offer our indexing tools and database to allow members to add less popular books to their recipe searches. We also proofread those indexes as we need to maintain the quality of our data. So we spend time and money on indexes of books we would never index ourselves, that are sometimes only owned by that member, or Free members who pay nothing to use our service.
I’m not sure why you think people shouldn’t pay for life a tool of convenience. New books and magazines are indexed every day thereby increasing the number of recipes in our members searches. Not just those newly published but also older books. Those are costs that we need to cover with subscription fees. We do not have advertising nor do we exploit our members data or activities. There are lots of sites with free recipes, which it sounds like you require. You also are free to create your own database of all your recipes. Perhaps then you’ll see how much work it involves and that it’s worth $2.50 a month!
In response to Additional Thoughts and Experiences:
Again, we are not a recipe site and we do not offer “downloads of recipes”. We help our members find recipes and they then use their book or magazine to cook from. Of course you can instead search every book you own. But a search on EYB gives you better and faster results - pulling down all your books and looking through each index is very time consuming. And the back of the book index does not list every ingredient (EYB goes right down to herbs and spices) or list the categories that EYB has – recipe types, ethnicity, special diet, meal/course and season/occasion. And the EYB mobile site lets you search your cookbooks when you are away from home (like in the grocery store or the farmers market).
Downloads of recipes would be a breach of the publisher and author’s copyright. There if no foolproof way for you to prove you own a book and even if you could, publishers are unlikely to allow that option.
Every book indexed in the past seven years has page numbers. We didn’t originally add them as a book is indexed once from the most popular edition and then all other editions are linked to it so the data is shared. We felt it would be confusing if your edition had a different layout and page numbering. However since it’s not so common that books change layout we have added page numbers since 2015. We are working our way through the books added in our first 5 years adding missing page numbers. It’s unfortunate that the two you looked at were early indexes. Maybe add some more recent books?
If you don’t cook a lot, it really doesn’t help much. If, like my wife, you have hundreds of cookbooks filling several bookshelves near the kitchen, this kind of index can be extremely convenient. If you’re thinking about what to make, you probably aren’t going to thumb through the table of contents on a dozen books in order to find something - you’re probably going to go to one or two favorites and ignore the rest. A search engine like this will help you discover/remember everything else in your collection.
Whether it’s worth the subscription fee is, of course, a matter of personal opinion.
Thank you for clarifying this for me. In my case I have a bookcase in my home office with 5 4’ length shelves filled tightly with cookbooks; some of the smaller books filled double depth. I have not purchased a new one in many years preferring to download and print recipes that I save from on-line or purchase eBook’s which allows me to print pages or save them to a mobile device to use in the kitchen. Additionaly many of my books, abet older books, are not indexed on EYB. For me this site is next to useless as many of my recipes are not from websites that are included in EYB and I can use the free App, Microsoft One Note to save and search for recipes on my computer or most any mobile device with the list of ingredients and recipe included as well as use it in the kitchen. If I want a list of ingredients on my phone when I go shopping, I use Alexa and create the list by speaking it. I can also check off things on my list as I put them into my cart. No paper involved. One Note can also capture and organize website content while browsing. A quick search indicated about ⅓ are indexed. For me this site will do little to improve my productivity in finding and using recipies - which is why I choose to remove my registration for it.
Obviously no service is right for everyone. For me, though, Eat Your Books is easily worth $2.50-$3.00 per month. Just in the few days I’ve used it I’ve found and made recipes in my cookbooks that I never would have found otherwise. I’ve already started tagging others with the “I want to make this” bookmark. My wife and I both enjoy cooking but over the course of the pandemic I really lost the motivation to find and try new recipes. This has rekindled my interest in cooking and exploring recipes. I’m grateful for that.
Jeff, glad you discovered Eat Your Books. You and I have some cookbooks in common, but I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I have more than 275. Of course, I’ve been collecting since 1970. I found out about Eat Your Books in July 2014 and joined immediately. Eat Your Books works great for me combined with a couple of paid website memberships (ATK, NYT and ChefSteps) and lots of free ones (Serious Eats, several others). The Paprika app is great for storing the online recipes. Some people will object to paying for that many services, but I know a lot of people who spend a lot more on their hobby than I do, such as golfers and skiers.
Hey Jeff - just read your review of EYB not to be confused with CYB - in any case your mention of Seattle made me reply to say I’m waving from Puyallup!
I love this so much! I am a cookbook collector and I have lots and lots of them. I tried to do this on my own many years ago by photocopying the indexes to cookbooks. It was overwhelming and way too time consuming for me. Being able to search recipes in the books I have invested in makes me very happy.
I already created an account on their website and I entered some of my favorite cookbooks! I cannot wait to enter all my cookbooks and get cooking! Thank you!
As the owner of way too many cookbooks, including lots of old or obscure bread books, this site saves me lots of time and effort. Unfortunately it also costs me money as there are periodic notices of upcoming releases. Without those I might remain unaware of many tempting cookbooks and might not buy them. Thanks, I think.
Sorry to bump this old conversation, but I wasn’t sure of a better place to add this comment: According to a few twitter/reddit threads, it seems that the cooking/recipe website, Condé Nast’s Epicurious.com, changed its operating model without notifying users, leading to many users losing their personally-curated lists of recipes, some of which were years in the making. Previously free content now is behind a paywall, and evidently many users’ recipe hand-curated lists/folders have been removed, even though the original recipes may remain on the site.
I can’t personally vouch for the details, but it is a good reminder to make sure you consider how you might maintain access to any truly important information – including your favorite recipes – that you store in a cloud-based service in case the cloud service changes its rules or disappears.
This is exactly why I’ve used Paprika for years to save my online recipes database. The New York Times also now requires subscription to use their recipe website. Interestingly, I also discovered that Paprika can read and save the recipe, even if it is covered by a paywall subscription pop-up.
Yes, I second the use of Paprika (iOS and MacOS). And also found out that even though a pop up shows that you need a subscription to NYTimes Cooking (I already have a subscription to the e-paper) it will grab the recipe that was tantalizingly shown to you while you are reading the regular NYTimes online.
