Private information retrieval (PIR) is a way for clients to query a remote database without the database holder learning the clients' query terms or the responses they generate. Compelling applications for PIR abound in the cryptographic and privacy research literature, yet existing PIR techniques are notoriously inefficient. Consequently, no such PIR-based application to date has seen real-world at-scale deployment. In this talk, I will discuss some ongoing research that unifies "batch query" and "batch coding" techniques to help address PIR's efficiency problem. The new approach exploits the connection between 'ramp secret sharing schemes' and multi-server, information-theoretically secure PIR (IT-PIR) protocols, thereby enabling clients to fetch several records from an IT-PIR database for only *a fraction* the cost of fetching *a single record* using the standard approach. The approach is highly tuneable, and I will briefly discuss interesting asymptotic phenomenon that arise with extremal settings of the various tuning knobs.