Eat Your Books & the CookShelf App: A Cookbook Lover’s Dream Come True

Lisa Wright Burbach
3 days ago
4 min read

TLDR -because so true for some us right?!

Do you have cookbooks on your shelves that you barely use? I do! Or I never got around to seeing what recipes are actually in them! Problem solved!! Eat Your Books and their companion app, CookShelf is here to change it all! I’m seriously excited by this. It touches my researcher, organizer, and cookbook lover buttons all at once!

Eat Your Books is a searchable index of the cookbooks and food magazines you already own. You enter ingredients or recipe names, and it tells you exactly which book or magazine to pull and what page to turn to. No recipes are shown — just smart indexing. It saves time, helps you actually use your collection, and is absolutely worth the annual subscription 100%!

I know that Eat Your Books has been around for a long time, but I really never fully understood all that they offer until now. I’m on my second weekend of being snowed in. The first weekend I saw a Reel about the app, clicked it, and yaassss!!! How did I miss this before?! It was crazy easy to add my cookbooks. This weekend, I added all of my Kindle cookbooks and magazines, too!

A Deeper Dive!

What Is Eat Your Books?

Eat Your Books is essentially a search engine for the cookbooks and food magazines you already own, plus ones you may want to own in the future. Because they add a "buy book" button!! There is also a place for blogs and online recipes, and your own recipe box.

Important note: it does not provide the recipes themselves. Instead, it indexes them. When you search, it tells you exactly which book or magazine to pull and what page the recipe is on. For example, I had ravioli and peas in my freezer, I plugged it in, and it told me to go to a specific issue of The Food Network Magazine that I had on my Kindle. I pulled it up on my Ipad and started cooking!

This means you still get to enjoy your physical books, Kindle cookbooks, and magazines — just without the endless flipping and guessing. Don’t get me wrong, I love to flip through a cookbook and often read them cover to cover, but when it’s time to make dinner, I just need to get to it and don’t have the time to search a bunch of books for ideas. Most of us use the internet for that and online recipes because it’s easier. But now we have another option!

My First Impression (a.k.a. Love at First Search)

During our snow days, I had extra time at home and decided to really go for it. I added:

All of my physical cookbooks, including my 1945 Joy of Cooking, 1968 Better Homes and Gardens, and a very old copy of Escoffier Cookbook, and my copy of Virginia Hospitality, a spiral-bound book from a Woman's Club group that became wildly popular in the south.
All of my Kindle cookbooks - more than I realized I had!!
My food magazines — both paper and Kindle versions. I’m still in mourning that I purged years of Martha Stewart Living magazines to avoid “clutter”. Then she stopped making the magazine, and I cried! I’m slowly adding my favorite issue back in!!

I was immediately impressed. So impressed, in fact, that I went straight from the one-week free trial to a full-year subscription without hesitation.

I genuinely love this. I can already tell it’s going to save me hours of time and help me finally use the cookbooks I already own consistently and without having to rely on remembering where a certain recipe was.

And let’s be honest… we all have that cookbook. The one we were sure we needed, and then it quietly sat on the shelf for years. Right?! Yes!! I do! Now I’m more likely to use it.

I can’t stress enough how powerful it feels to have every recipe I own indexed and ready to go.

Here are a few standout features:

1. Easy to Add Books & Magazines

Adding your collection is simple. Many books can be scanned in using the barcode, which is incredibly fast.

Tip: If a title doesn’t show up right away, try searching by the author’s name. That usually does the trick.

2. Incredibly Easy to Use

You can search by:

Recipe name
Ingredient(s) you want to use
Author
Tags, etc.

Eat Your Books then shows you all matching recipes and tells you exactly which book or magazine they’re in.

Again, no recipes are displayed — you’ll still grab your book — but the searching is done for you. Think of it as a brilliant personal librarian for your kitchen. Or, if you’re like me, think of it as your card catalog for all of your recipes!

3. Community & Forums

There’s also a forum where you can connect with other cooks and cookbook lovers. It’s a great place for tips, notes on recipes, and that comforting sense that you’re among people who maybe own just as many cookbooks as you do.

4. Price & Value

The subscription is $39.99 per year (about $3.33 a month).

At first glance, I paused — especially since I use a similar crafting app that costs about a third of that. But the more I explored Eat Your Books, the more the value became clear.

There is an enormous amount of work happening behind the scenes: indexing thousands of cookbooks, coordinating with users who help index, and keeping the whole system running smoothly.

Honestly? It’s 100% worth it.

Final Thoughts

Eat Your Books is a valuable tool that helps you:

Save time
Reduce decision fatigue
Use the books and magazines you already own
Learn from others
Maybe connect with like-minded people

And with so many people leaning back toward a more analog lifestyle, this feels like the perfect bridge — modern technology that supports real, physical books.

If you love cookbooks, collect them, or sometimes feel overwhelmed by them, I can’t recommend Eat Your Books enough.

This is one of those rare finds that makes you say, “How did I live without this?”

I hope this review helps you "Eat Your Books"! Enjoy!