Who is reading enthusiastically - City Edition

I am a sucker for lists and maps and therefore particularly prone to maps of lists. From The Most Well-Read Cities in the United States by David Vandagriff.

A study conducted by Amazon and therefore potentially skewed to the degree that Amazon sales patterns differ from non-amazon sales. Given that Amazon is some 60% of the channel to market for books, it is possible that that concern may be misplaced. The list is total sales (e-book and print) of books, magazines and newspapers in cities larger than 100,000. With those caveats, the 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Alexandria, Va.
2. Miami, Fla.
3. Knoxville, Tenn.
4. Seattle, Wash.
5. Orlando, Fla.
6. Ann Arbor, Mich.
7. Berkeley, Calif.
8. Cambridge, Mass.
9. Cincinnati, Ohio
10. Columbia, S.C.
11. St. Louis, Mo.
12. Pittsburgh, Penn.
13. Vancouver, Wash.
14. Salt Lake City, Utah
15. Atlanta, Ga.
16. Gainesville, Fla.
17. Dayton, Ohio
18. Clearwater, Fla.
19. Richmond, Va.
20. Tallahassee, Fla.

I last saw something like this maybe 5-10 years ago and at that time it was compiled, not on sales, but on number of bookstores per 100,000 or some similar measure. So more a measure of the prevalence of an apparent book culture rather than a measure of actual book consumption. It was quite a different list of cities.

Happy to see Atlanta on this list at #15. I am struck that, counter to stereotypes, cities in the South are 50% of the list. Of your stereotypical hotbeds of culture; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, only Boston makes an appearance (with Cambridge). Actually, I guess San Francisco ought to be included as well with Berkeley. Otherwise, the enthusiastic readers are almost completely in flyover country and the South.