Methodology
Reater answers one question: what do influential people actually read? Not what their publicist says they read. What they name, unprompted or on the record, in public.
What counts as a recommendation
- 1. Public. The recommendation appeared somewhere anyone can check: a podcast episode, a published interview, a blog post, a list.
- 2. Attributed. The figure named the book themselves, or their official list did. No "people like them also read" guessing.
- 3. Sourced. Every entry links to the exact source. If a source disappears, the entry is flagged, not silently kept.
Why sources are the product
Tracking where a recommendation surfaced turns a list into a dataset. It shows which podcasts surface the most books, which newsletters break new picks first, and how taste travels between fields. The charts page is built entirely from this source metadata.
Podcasts
A host asks what a guest is reading, or a guest brings it up unprompted.
YouTube
Interviews, lectures, and long-form conversations.
Blogs
Personal essays and annual lists published on personal sites.
Interviews
Print and broadcast interviews with a reading question.
Newsletters
What authors put in their own dispatches.
Books
Books recommended inside other books: forewords, bibliographies, acknowledgments.
Posts
Short-form public posts naming a book.
Reading lists
Official annual or topical lists published by the figure.
Built for AI agents
Reater is agent-first. Every page is semantic HTML with JSON-LD, and the whole dataset ships as JSON:
- /llms.txt - site summary for language models
- /api/figures.json
- /api/books.json
- /api/recommendations.json
Money and independence
Reater earns as an Amazon Associate when readers buy through links on this site, and through Audible referrals. Rankings are never for sale: order is computed from the data, and sponsored placement does not exist here.
Corrections welcome. If a recommendation is misattributed or a source link rots, it gets fixed or removed.
Image credits
Figure portraits come from Wikimedia Commons. Public-domain images need no credit; the rest are used under their Creative Commons licenses, credited here:
- Bill Gates portrait, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Elon Musk portrait, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Satya Nadella portrait, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Sam Altman portrait by Village Global, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Patrick Collison portrait, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Paul Graham portrait, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Reid Hoffman portrait, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Naval Ravikant portrait, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Demis Hassabis portrait, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Tyler Cowen portrait, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Portraits of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, and Jensen Huang are public-domain official photographs. Book covers are served from the Open Library Covers API.