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.com has a very clever idea. You have a shelf full of dozens or hundreds of cookbooks, right? But it is a pain in the butt to find all the eggplant recipes in them. So you use the web instead and end up with a bunch of dubious 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. It probably won't have every book you own, but you can request them for later indexing. In just the 24 books I've entered so far (which took 10 minutes), I can see 99 eggplant recipes, narrow it down to 22 Indian ones, 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.

I should note that EYB did give me a free membership – but of course I'm telling you about them because I think it is a killer service, not because of the freebie. They have a free trial, so check it out.

I should also mention GobbledyBook.com by Seattle food photographer extraordinaire, Lara Ferroni. The idea is similar, but it is always free and if the book you want isn't in there, you can index it yourself. So it is a more open solution, but because of that it has much less content (5,000 recipes vs. 250,000). You'll have to 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!