Website Directs Foodies Away From Laptop, Over To Bookshelf

While 2009 saw a few cookbooks by big chefs performing very well - note Ad Hoc at Home and of course, the Triple D Cookbook -- the rise in popularity of recipe sites like Epicurious and Cookstr does not bode well for the already beleaguered publishing industry. A new website, EatYourBooks, might help renew home chefs' interest in cookbooks by basically allowing them to use the site as an Epicurious-style search engine for the home bookshelf.

How it works: once users create a list of cookbooks they already own and enter a recipe in the search field, the site pulls up the book and page number of recipes from their home bookshelf, with a shopping list. While the site is still in its early stages, major publishers have already begun courting the site's owners with advanced copies of cookbooks for the database, and plans for a video series and author book tour database are also in the works.

While the potential is there for the site to grow into a home base for cookbook lovers on the web, sites like Cookstr already offer not only a searchable cookbook recipe database for free -- a years subscription to EatYourBooks is $25.

· Eat Your Books Indexes Cookbooks [Publishers Weekly]