Our Origins

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Who started Allreaders.com?

(Steve with Beaver the Pomeranian in Riverside Park)

These sites were created by one person, me, Steve Gordon. One person, creating a big site like this? Sounds improbable.

But I've done it before.

1) I'm a graduate of Yale University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and from Harvard Law School.

2) I single-handedly created the very first large scale experts site on the internet, Allexperts.com.

3) I and my work have been featured in over 80 magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, Wired magazines, and others.

4) I instinctively deduced the principals behind the Gordonator Precision Search Engine, and the interface needed to power it.

5) I recruited the thousands of volunteers to help build the GPSE into the thing of beauty it is today, and

6) I'm a writer myself: 18 novels and counting. I'm currently thinking of branching out into short films.

7) I live in the very dirty New York City, unfortunately, where every inch of sidewalk is covered with spent gum or animal or bum droppings, where cashiers think time is an abstract and endless concept, and where those both fetid and insane roam the streets.

Why Allreaders was created: To get more people reading more books.

I got up one morning and realized that it was pretty difficult to find new authors I liked. I would have to stand in the bookstore for hours, reading the backs of books, buying a few, and then, when I got home and really started reading, realizing that I didn't really like what I had bought. Shopping online was even worse, because I didn't have the backs of those bookcovers to read.

I realized immediately that fiction, unlike non-fiction, was very difficult to classify. I noticed that unless a book was a "top 20" book, it wasn't browsable on Amazon.com et.al. unless one knew the exact author or title to look for. One couldn't search for a book with a specific kind of plot, or a specific kind of character. New authors had trouble getting discovered, and even established authors had trouble expanding their reach.

Being a writer, I started thinking about what people liked, and disliked about books. I realized that people didn't just like books, they liked certain plots in books, certain kinds of characters in books, certain kinds and amounts of action and dialogue in books. if I could turn this idea into a database that could be accessed by a search engine, I would be doing the fiction readers and writers of the world a great service.

The same applied to our movie review engine at Allwatchers.com. What allreaders could do for books, allwatchers could do for movies.

And so I created the GPSE, the Gordonator Precision Search Engine. Catchy title, eh? All the focus groups loved it.

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