EatYourBooks.com and GobbledyBook.com - Two Sites for Indexing Your Cookbooks

I wanted to let you know about a service I just learned about. EatYourBooks.comhas a very clever idea. You have a shelf full of dozens or hundreds ofcookbooks, right? But it is a pain in the butt to find all the eggplantrecipes in them. So you use the web instead and end up with a bunch ofdubious recipes. (Unless you find them on my site; then you know they are solid gold, baby :).

On EYB, they have 16,500 cookbooks indexed.You tell it which ones you own, and then you can search them. Itprobably won't have every book you own, but you can request them forlater indexing. In just the 24 books I've entered so far (which took 10minutes), I can see 99 eggplant recipes, narrow it down to 22 Indianones, and see that there is Eggplant Pakora with Poppy Seeds in The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking and Andhra Spiced Eggplant in Mangoes and Curry Leaves. Sweet. I'm going to get a lot more use out of my cookbooks.

Ishould note that EYB did give me a free membership - but of course I'mtelling you about them because I think it is a killer service, notbecause of the freebie. They have a free trial, so check it out.

I should also mention GobbledyBook.comby Seattle food photographer extraordinaire, Lara Ferroni. The idea issimilar, but it is always free and if the book you want isn't in there, youcan index it yourself. So it is a more open solution, but because ofthat it has much less content (5,000 recipes vs. 250,000). You'll haveto decide for yourself whether you'd rather go DIY for free or pay$25/year to use a bigger database.

And speaking of indexing your recipes, I just built this new visual index to all of the recipes on Herbivoracious. Check it out and let me know what you think!

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