The Most Well-Read Cities in America

NEW YORK (MainStreet) – Residents of Cambridge, Mass. – the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – read more books than residents of any other city in the country, according to Amazon.com.

The online retailer (which, you may recall, got its start as a humble bookseller) looked at which cities with more than 100,000 residents have ordered the most books, e-books, magazines and newspapers per capita on its website since the beginning of the year. While it did not release specific sales figures for the respective cities, Cambridge took top billing, and it was also at the top of the list for non-fiction book sales.

Perhaps not surprisingly, college towns dominated the rankings. Berkeley, Calif. – home of the University of California, Berkeley – ranked third, and also cracking the top 10 were Ann Arbor, Mich. (University of Michigan), Boulder, Colo. (University of Colorado) and Gainesville, Fla. (University of Florida). Gainesville was one of three Florida cities in the top 20, joined by Miami and Orlando.

Amazon also notes that Boulder led all American cities in cookbook sales, and Alexandria, Va. bought the most children’s books – unsurprising given that it’s a large suburb of Washington, D.C.

The top 10 cities in per-capita book sales are as follows:

1. Cambridge, Mass.
2. Alexandria, Va.
3. Berkeley, Calif.
4. Ann Arbor, Mich.
5. Boulder, Colo.
6. Miami
7. Salt Lake City
8. Gainesville, Fla.
9. Seattle
10. Arlington, Va.

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