The Culture Vulture: Ann Arbor Fourth Best Read City in the U.S.

Today, Amazon.com released its list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. The company compiled sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since January 1, 2011. According to that information, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

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.

11. Knoxville, Tenn.

12. Orlando, Fla.

13. Pittsburgh

14. Washington, D.C.

15. Bellevue, Wash.

16. Columbia, S.C.

17. St. Louis, Mo.

18. Cincinnati

19. Portland, Ore.

20. Atlanta

According to a officials from Amazon.com, not only do residents of Cambridge like to read, but they like to know the facts: Cambridge, Massachusetts—home to Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—topped the list of cities that ordered the most nonfiction books. Boulder residents evidently live up to their reputation as health nuts. Residents of that city topped Amazon’s list of towns that order the most books in the Cooking, Food & Wine category. Alexandria, Virginia residents ordered the most children’s books. Florida was the state with the most cities in the Top 20, with Miami, Gainesville and Orlando residents reading their way into the category of best read cities in the United States.

Less than four years after their introduction, Kindle electronic books are now outselling physical books on Amazon.com.

Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon has sold — including paper books for which there are no Kindle books available — it has sold 105 Kindle books. The company has sold more than three times as many Kindle books in 2011 as it did in the same time period in 2010.

Amazon released the Kindle First Generation on November 19, 2007, for $399 and the device sold out in under six hours. Kindles remained out of stock until April 2008.

In 2010, Amazon sales accounted for 59 percent of e-readers shipped, and the company gained 14 market share points. According to an IDC study done in March 2011, sales for all e-book readers worldwide rose to 12.8 million devices purchased in 2010; 48 percent of them were Kindle models.

That Ann Arbor book sales should be near the top of Amazon.com’s list could explain, in part, the June 30, 2009 closure of long-time independent book shop Shaman Drum.

According to a piece posted to the L.A. Times Book blog in June 2009:

In February, [Shaman Drum bookshop owner] Karl Pohrt had sounded the alarm, writing that textbook sales declined $510,000 from the year before, and that despite $80,000 subequent cuts in payroll and operating expenses, the store was still in trouble. He wrote that the decline was sudden and steep, and the community — at least from this distance — seemed to rally in support.

“It’s part of the lifeblood of the community,” University of Michigan graduate student Ken Garner told the Ann Arbor News. “It’s really been central to Ann Arbor’s intellectual life.”

The Ann Arbor News, of course, closed one month later, and seven months after that Border’s, founded and headquartered in Ann Arbor, filed for “bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, a widely expected move after years of increased competition, declining sales and months of missed payments to its vendors,” according to a piece published in The New York Times in February of 2011.