By joining Eat Your Books with a library membership, you open up the cookbook collection on your shelves to your patrons, in a way never before possible. They can now search your books for particular recipes or view a book to see what recipes it contains before coming to the library.
Our indexers list each recipe title and then the major ingredients from that recipe under the cookbook title. No minor ingredients, which are considered store-cupboard ingredients, no measurements and no instructions are shared – the member needs to own the book or borrow it from the library to obtain the full recipe. The index also includes category tags that can be used to filter the recipe search – recipe type, special diet, ethnicity, occasion/season, meal/course. New cookbooks (as well as older titles) are indexed every week.
EYB is NOT a recipe site, so the recipes are not available, but users will be able to determine what books contain the recipes they need and if there is an online version of the recipe approved by the publisher there will be a link to it.
As well as cookbooks, EYB indexes food magazines from around the world. Many blogs and newspaper columns are also indexed. More than 2.5million recipes have been indexed so far with more than 2.1million of the recipes from cookbooks.
BENEFITS TO LIBRARIES:
- An Eat Your Books membership allows the library patrons to find recipes in the library’s cookbook collection. They can search all the cookbooks at once to see which one they want to borrow as it contains the recipes they need.
- Cookbook users can see at a glance what cookbooks are in the library’s collection and examine the recipes contained in each book before deciding what to borrow.
- EYB covers all new cookbook releases every month so exposes library patrons to new cookbooks that may be of interest.
- In addition to the library’s own recipe collection, library patrons can search and access EYB’s online recipes – currently more than 500,000 recipes where the full recipe is just one click away.
- EYB has a lively community of home cooks who share recipe ratings, reviews and photos. Although library patrons will not be able to add these, they can read and benefit from this huge resource.
- EYB also has a blog and forum where food news and cookbook discussions can be read, though not contributed to by library patrons.
- Library patrons can use the site to search their own cookbooks though they would need to create their own membership to create their private collection. But for instance, if they own all the Barefoot Contessa books and cannot remember which book a recipe is in, rather than wading through all the indexes to find the recipe, they can use the EYB search.
HOW TO SET UP A LIBRARY MEMBERSHIP
- Set up a Free membership here. When choosing your username keep it short as that is what will display for your patrons on the site - e.g. rather than University of State City Campus Library have your username be USCL. The email should be the admin person who will manage this membership.
- Now contact info@eatyourbooks.com. We will give you a quote for your annual membership based on your patron numbers. Once that is agreed and paid we will upgrade your membership type to Library.
- You can now import the ISBN numbers of your collection, using our Import Books feature, explained here in Help. Please only import food and drink books. 500 ISBN numbers can be imported at a time. If any books are not yet in the EYB Library, we will import that book data.
- Once your cookbook collection is all added to your Bookshelf, you can create access links for your patrons on your Account page. Once a link is set up, you create a QR code and a URL shortlink to distribute to your patrons.
- If you also add your library IP address to the link then patrons signing in at the library do not need to add the username when signing in. For patrons signing in when away from the library they need to know the username as well as the QR or URL.
- Please contact info@eatyourbooks.com if you would like poster artwork or bookmarks to publicize this new service to your patrons. Any questions, please contact the same email.