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Jane @ EYB

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Brooks Robinson

Brooks Robinson (6/123)

  1. On reading the posts today I thought I should clarify what the Eat Your Books website is about. It absolutely does NOT contain the recipes - there are no quantities, store-cupboard ingredients or methods on the website. It is an online index to find recipes in your own cookbooks using main ingredients, ethnicity, recipe type, meal/course, special diet and occasion as the criteria. There would be no point in adding cookbooks to your EYB Bookshelf that you do not own as you will need the book to cook the recipe. NCPinDC - EYB is the opposite of your statement "it seems to strip any economic value the cookbooks have for their authors" - cookbook authors love the website as it increases the value of the cookbook for the owner, the cookbook author is getting more publicity through EYB, we provide information about the authors (book tours, links to their websites, etc) and they are joining themselves in order to better use the cookbooks they own. Monavano and DCS - we have not copied the cookbooks. We have created a master index that allows you the search and find recipes in your own cookbooks. You have to own the cookbook to cook from it. Having said that you can search the entire EYB library for recipes (more than 176,000 currently) if you are looking for a specific recipe. But you have to buy the book or borrow it from the library to cook it. Pat - I hope you will try out EYB (there is a 30-day free trail). It is not at all "clunky" like the print index you used. The searches are fast and easy. I hope this clears up any misunderstandings. Contrary to the suggestion that we are somehow cheating cookbook publishers and authors, they in fact love Eat Your Books. We consulted all the major cookbook publishers before we set up the website and they are very enthusiastic. Think about it - one of their major worries must be the proliferation of online recipe sites. And one of the major reasons people like online recipe sites is the ease of finding recipes. Now cookbook owners can have the same search facilities for their books. This really increases the value of cookbooks and encourages future book sales. EYB also promotes new cookbooks, provides a forum for cookbook lovers to discuss books and recipes, provides links to cookbook authors' websites, and many more benefits to the publisher and author. In reality they should be paying us to index their books as it is a very expensive process - that is why there is a membership fee ($2 a month). I do hope that people will check out the website at www.eatyourbooks.com so you can see for yourself how it works. Even if you don't want to register for the free trial there are a lot of pages you can view without joining up.
  2. I am the co-founder of a new website, www.eatyourbooks.com, which is a search engine for recipes in your cookbooks. We are looking for more data inputters - that is entering into a database the recipe name and then selecting from pre-entered lists the main ingredients, ethnicity, recipe type, etc. Culinary knowledge is a definite plus but accuracy is as important. This is work you can do from home in your own time. You will get the cookbooks from your local library (or you may own them). If you are interested apply to jane@eatyourbooks.com.
  3. We did consider long and hard about how to fund the website. We decided that most of our potential members will have invested hundreds (thousands?) of dollars in their cookbook collection so $2 a month to get much better usage didn't seem unreasonable. The other funding models suggested were rejected: advertising is very volume driven - we aren't trying for millions of casual vistors, more a smaller number of members who really care about their cookbooks. Also personally I find pop-ups and intrusive ads for naff products (the kind of cooking products I never use) quite annoying. The second funding model suggested of publishers or authors paying for their books to be indexed would work for new cookbooks that they are trying to promote but most of us have well-used cookbooks on our shelves going back 10-30 years (or more). No publisher is going to pay to have older and even out-of-print cookbooks indexed. But these are the cookbooks we cherish. So I do hope you are wrong that mnost people won't pay for anything on the internet. If something has a value to you it shouldn't matter whether it is on the internet, through your TV, through your mailbox or in the store. If it's a great product and you want it, you should pay for it.
  4. I've just joined and I found DR as there was a post about my new website, www.eatyourbooks.com, which prompted me to find the site. Although I don't live in DC (I'm outside Boston) I thought the site looked like it lots of interesting general food discussions, not just about DC. About me - I'm a Brit who moved to the USA 10 years ago (and am now a citizen). I've never worked professionally in the food industry but I am a very enthusiastic cook and eater in restaurants. I have a huge collection of cookbooks (around 700) and felt I wasn't using them enough as I never had the time to search through them. So I had the idea of an online search engine for the recipes in your cookbooks. Eat your Books has just launched so check it out. We are very open to comments and suggestions for new features.
  5. I'm the co-founder of Eat Your Books and would like to clarify that you can request books to be indexed. Before we launched we indexed what we thought were the 700 most likely books that cookbook lovers would own. The intention was (and is in fact happening) that as members join they request books we haven't indexed yet so we can then prioritize future indexing. We are also adding new major books as they are published. So, send us your index requests, foodtrip, and we will increase that 50% ratio. I do hope DanielK that you will try EYB and find it is worth the fee. As you can imagine it costs a lot to index each book, especially monsters like The Joy of Cooking, and it increases the value of your cookbook collection enormously. For the first time you can search all of your cookbooks simultaneously and search by lots of criteria that aren't in the book index such as herbs, spices, ethnicity, special diet, etc. For the first time you can find all the recipes in your cookbooks that contain a particular ingredient or you can combine search criteria - show me all my Vietnamese soups containing shrimp. We have only just launched so are very open to comments and suggestions for new features.
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