Which cities in the United States have the most bookworms? Amazon has just announced a list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America:
After compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:
- Cambridge, Mass.
- Alexandria, Va.
- Berkeley, Calif.
- Ann Arbor, Mich.
- Boulder, Colo.
- Miami
- Salt Lake City
- Gainesville, Fla.
- Seattle
- Arlington, Va.
- Knoxville, Tenn.
- Orlando, Fla.
- Pittsburgh
- Washington, D.C.
- Bellevue, Wash.
- Columbia, S.C.
- St. Louis, Mo.
- Cincinnati
- Portland, Ore.
- Atlanta
A few more nifty details:
- Cambridge, Mass., ordered the most nonfiction books
- Boulder, Colo., ordered the most books in the Cooking, Food & Wine category
- Alexandria, Va., residents ordered the most children's books
- Miami, Gainesville, and Orlando topped the list of buying the most books from the Summer reading list
Is your city listed?
... besides that : biais! biais! biais! ;)
That is certainly the crucial datum here. While I'm perhaps pleased to see my home town (Gainesville) ranked highly, given that our population is substantially smaller than most of the other cities listed -- maybe all my students at UF *are* reading outside of assigned materials?! -- this measure of "well-read" cities seems to me further evidence of a fatal recursion.
Online sales via Amazon et al. contributed substantially to the slow decline and eventual demise of a fine local independent bookseller, Goerings Books, a center of intellectual ferment that had served the Gainesville community for nearly 40 years.
Now that Goerings is closed (and our local Borders has also closed, leaving us with one small Barnes & Noble and -- ugh -- two Books-a-Million), serious readers in Gainesville are *obliged* to turn to online purchasing to get their books. So our profile in Amazon's rankings of "most literate cities" therefore rises. My guess is that this scenario has been repeated elsewhere.
It's not a measure of literacy. It's a measure of market consolidation.