We are a group of enthusiastic cookbook lovers. We wanted to get more from our cookbooks and we figured a lot of other people wanted to as well so we set up Eat Your Books, now owned by CookShelf, Inc. We are a small, privately owned company, staffed by dedicated people. We love what we do and we work at making every visit our members make to EYB an enjoyable one.
Katie Thacher, CEO of CookShelf, started cooking at age 4 from her first beloved cookbook, Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls. She grew up cooking constantly, teaching herself to cook from cookbooks (in particular The Herbfarm Cookbook), and eventually testing recipes for cookbooks, working in the kitchen and garden of The Herbfarm Restaurant as a teenager, and writing a cookbook for a local spice and tea company in college.
Katie graduated from Middlebury College and subsequently did her MBA at Washington University in St. Louis. She then worked for Walk Score and Redfin, before going to ChefSteps, a cooking content and sous vide device company, to lead product marketing. After ChefSteps, Katie spent 6 years in product management and leadership roles at Amazon, focusing first on the Kindle apps for iOS and Android, and subsequently on the podcast customer experience in Amazon Music. Across these roles, Katie gained deep experience in app design, search, and recommendations.
While her career moved away from food, she never lost her passion for cookbooks, food, entertaining, and cooking. She worked with a good friend to co-found Little Thing, a wine shop and bar in Seattle, and then founded her own company, CookShelf, with the goal of creating an app for home cooks. With CookShelf taking ownership of EYB, Katie is finally able to bring together her lifelong love of cooking and cookbooks with her career experience in consumer apps, and she couldn’t be more excited to open this next chapter with Eat Your Books.
Jane Kelly, co-founder of Eat Your Books and COO of CookShelf, was frustrated by how long it took to find a recipe in her own vast cookbook collection, so she came up with the idea for EYB as an easy solution to find recipes and utilize more of the books on her shelf. With a lifelong interest in cookbooks and cooking at home, Jane launched her first company in the late 90s - an online business selling cookbooks.
Jane started her career in the music and TV industry in the UK, working for the independent record label Stiff Records, starting the first music TV station in Europe, and running one of the Virgin Group companies. She currently lives near Boston, Massachusetts and has two adult children, both living in New York City. When she's not cooking or working, you can find her playing pickleball, crafting cocktails for friends, or watching movies.
Venkat Ramamurthy, Head of Engineering for CookShelf, has deep experience in building consumer mobile applications and developing search and recommendation systems. He graduated from Panjab University with a Bachelors in Engineering, and then received a Masters of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech. Post-education, Venkat started his career at eBay, and then spent 8 years at Amazon, eventually becoming one of the founding engineers on the podcast team in Amazon Music, and leading an initiative to bring Prime benefits to podcasts. He makes a mean chana masala with black chickpeas.
Prior to becoming the Director of Operations for Eat Your Books, Jenny Hartin wrote for various websites and venues doing cookbook reviews and feature pieces. She is a member of the James Beard Book Awards Committee. She is the founder of The Cookbook Junkies, a Facebook group that brings cookbook fanatics together, as well as a website of the same name. Jenny is the mother of two sons and lives in Colorado with her husband and youngest son. She spends her time writing, cooking and baking and hoping that she isn't discovered under a pile of cookbooks. Her tombstone will read "she was always buried in cookbooks."
Darcie Boschee is a freelance food writer whose prior culinary experience includes work as a baker and caterer.
After living in various parts of the United States, she now makes her home in Minnesota with her husband, five cats, and 16 motorcycles. During the snowy winter months, when motorcycle riding is out of the question, Darcie creates craft cocktails, bakes (and eats) too many sweets, and dreams of warmer weather.
Sydney Chambers manages all member indexing on Eat Your Books - assigning books, proofreading finished books and giving feedback to member indexers. Following a short stint as a baker's apprentice, Sydney Chambers settled into a 35-year career as a catalog librarian in academic libraries. Soon after she discovered EYB, the member indexing program started. It sounded like the perfect opportunity to combine her interests in metadata creation and cookbooks. When she is not managing EYB member indexing, she is reading cookbooks, cooking, playing with her dogs, and gardening in eastern Washington.