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Paul McNamara

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Cambridge tops Amazon list of 'most well-read' cities

From the Make of This What You Will Department

By Paul McNamara on Thu, 05/26/11 - 10:37am.

. What's this?

Read 'em and weep, all you others: Amazon this morning has issued its list of the "Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America" and checking in at No. 1 is Cambridge, Mass., which I will note in behalf of my fellow Bay Staters, is pretty much representative of Massachusetts as a whole, at least in this case (ouch, I just hurt my back).

Of course, the list is based on a somewhat dubious assumption, namely that the quantity of what one reads - or, more precisely, the quantity of what one buys - is an accurate measure of the extent to which one is well read. Amazon compiled the list based on its sales in cities with populations of at least 100,000.

Three Florida cities made the cut -- the most of any state -- while Texas got blanked (I can hear the howls in Austin).

Here is the full list:

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

You'll notice that many of these cities are college towns, with Cambridge being home to Harvard and MIT, of course.

According to Amazon, there is more than accumulated knowledge that can be read into their sales numbers:

Alexandria residents are apparently better parents than the rest of us, the company suggests, because they order the most children's books (or maybe the city has a hidden adult literacy problem).

And, "Boulder, Colo., lives up to its reputation as a healthy city by topping the list of cities that order the most books in the Cooking, Food & Wine category."

Healthy? Hardly, it means Boulder residents like to eat and drink ... a lot ... and the good stuff.

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