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About eBookPie | Our Team

Publishers, Geeks, Travelers and Book Lovers.

We’re publishers, and we really love books, we’re passionate about technology, and we’re crazy about travel.

eBooks make a lot of sense to us.

During our travels (some of us work full-time from the road) we used to carry around large history tomes, boxes of travel guidebooks, thick cookbooks, piles of mysteries and biographies, all those books you just can’t leave behind. Books would have space priority over food and clothes.

But now we carry most of them inside our little reading devices. Makes for more foot room, less back pain, and when we finish a book in the middle of the night, instead of tripping around looking for another, we just download one. Presto!

But how did we get here?

Watching my mother-in-law tear up travel guides…

We worked for some years with innovative computer book publishers like O’Reilly Media, Pearson and Manning who were also early eBook pioneers, and we helped create new ways of publishing content. One day we watched my mother-in-law frantically pack for a trip to northern Italy. It was painful to see her roughly tear a few key chapters out of a heavy stack of thick Italy travel guides she’d collected, but as she stuffed those key chapters into her suitcase, we said “hmmm”.

Sometimes, like pizza, you only need a slice.

So we built eBookPie – Content Whole or Sliced. The goal is to provide you with just the content you want, in just the size and format you want it. We think you should have the choice – get a slice if that’s all you need, or have the whole pie. Or maybe you would like slices from a few different publishers? 

300,000+ ebook titles and more added daily

With over 300,000 titles available now and many more being added daily, you can probably find most any book you are looking for at eBookPie. Bestsellers, award winners and thousands of hidden gems from new and upcoming authors. You can download and read them on a growing list of great ebook readers, like the Sony Reader, the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, the Nook, the Kobo eReader, various Android handhelds and a variety of other devices. 

Slicebooks - A new digital publishing platform for slicing and remixing content

When we launched eBookPie we expected publishers would be able to easily slice their books into chapters for us. Turns out it is not so easy, and they often do not have the time or resources to figure it out. Our customers keep asking us for chapters, so we asked ourselves how we could make it easier for publishers to create chapters? Slicebooks was born. Slicebooks is a new digital publishing platform that enables publishers to quickly slice their entire catalog into chapters and sections, remix those chapters into new collections, edit metadata, promote and distribute their newly created slices and remixes. We just completed private beta and plan to launch Sliebooks in Spring 2012. If you are a publisher interested in slicing and remixing your digital content, contact us at slicebooks@ebookpie.com or visit slicebooks.com for more information.

Our Team

Shoot, there are only six of us so far, but we’re an agile, tenacious and globally adept group. Some are true road warriors who wake to a different view every day. One dabbles in rocket science, and another built his own house and grows his own food. But we all share a love for reading, writing, technology and publishing, and a curious passion for finding new ways to get there.

So if you really want to know, here’s a little bit of the story.

Jill Tomich, co-founder and CEO, has a passion for helping startup companies grow. As the first Sales Director at O’Reilly Media she played a large part in growing O’Reilly from a fledgling unknown niche publisher into an internationally recognized market leader. O’Reilly was a small group of twelve geeks working out of an old tavern house in Boston when she joined, and the books were staple-bound manuals. She traveled the country convincing skeptical bookstore owners that computer books could sell, and several years of exponential sales growth proved she was right. She has since held executive level publishing positions with Digital Education Inc., DigitalMed, Sun Microsystems and Pearson Education. In 2007 she took over DZone.com’s dormant Refcardz program and built it into a major driver of DZone traffic. Now she’s focused on bringing eBookPie to the world. Jill loves cycling, fly-fishing, skiing, the New York Giants, pasta, and swimming out to far-off ocean buoys in Pacific Mexico. She now does her reading on the Sony Reader and iPhone.

Ron Tomich, co-founder, President and Vision Chief, was a writer and publisher in Japan before becoming O’Reilly Media’s Managing Director, Asia Pacific. At O’Reilly Ron established local language publishing offices in Tokyo, Beijing and Taipei, and new distribution networks in South-East Asia, Australia and India. A million air miles and a thousand rice wine toasts later he nurtured those culturally disparate startup offices into mature independent profit centers. To jumpstart the O’Reilly brand in China he directed a 60-minute infomercial about the new wonders of the Internet. It played weekly on China’s national cable channel, generating both a spike in brand awareness and a box of creative post card solicitations from single country girls. Ron co-founded Digital Education Systems, one of the web’s first developers of web-based training programs. He later became Director of Sales and Marketing at Manning Publications, where he helped grow a small but innovative eBook program into a major product line. He’s passionate about surfing warm Mexico waves, fly fishing, mobile office technology and good basketball. Ron has boxes of books in storage but now does nearly all his reading on an iPad.

Glenn Harden is eBookPie’s webmaster, system administrator and jack-of-all technical troubleshooting needs. Glenn began his career as a Unix virtuoso in the mid-80’s when he did custom software installations on early Sun workstations for a Hollywood special effects company. He then spent a few years as Unix admin for a northern California company that developed office productivity software later purchased by Sun. He joined O’Reilly Media during a mad growth period for the company, and was responsible for maintaining a wide and not always complimentary assortment of servers and desktop machines running various flavors of Unix, MacOS, Windows and Novell. He later morphed into a Web Application Developer, writing and managing backend applications running on O’Reilly’s public web server. Glenn currently lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where he shares a wooded 20 acre farm with his wife and daughter, along with honey bees, goats, chickens, peacocks and four cats. We think he has electricity.

Kirill Ivkushkin, aka “Red Cyrax”, skillfully manages eBookPie site development and helps turn our visions in to code. He has long experience as an application developer, IT infrastructure manager and software architect for multinational corporations. But it is the challenge of getting a new project like eBookPie off the ground that gets his juices flowing. He also has degrees in biology and chemistry that we haven’t found a use for yet, and says he could build us a moon rocket if we ever need it. He prefers tea to vodka, and currently reads in English on a Sony Reader but wants another to hack into a Russian reader.

Sergey Zavilkin, webDev wizard and coder extraordinaire, puts the daily Ruby in our Rails. He’s skilled with JQuery and Prototypes, has serious database design skills, including MySQL, PostgreSQL and flashes some Oracle as well. But his Ruby on Rails skill is what makes it happen for eBookPie. He’s a warrior when we need him to be, always willing to code straight through the night and well into the next when the deadline demands it, which is almost always.

Iain Shigeoka serves as eBookPie’s Technical Advisor. Iain has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas, and is presently President and CEO at Metiscan Managed Services, where he heads Taptopia, an innovative iPhone applications development company. He previously was Director of Software Engineering at TeleM2M, Synosphere and Jive Software, and served as the Manning Publications Webmaster. Iain enjoys backpacking, cycling and sailing, and reads on an iPhone.