Amazon Ranks St. Louis 18th Most Well-Read City in America

By Paul Friswold Tue., May 15 2012 at 1:55 PM

Categories: Arts, Lists

Online retail juggernaut Amazon released its second-annual Most Well-Read Cities list, and St. Louis ended up at number eighteen. Of course, Amazon's basis for the rankings is its own sales figures (print and Kindle) on a per-capita basis for cities with more than 100,000 residents.

To which I say, "Step back and lick my Balzac, Amazon. We're much more well-read than that."

If you pay any attention at all to these lists -- and since the small percentage of the internet that is neither porn nor Facebook is mostly lists at this point, you can't avoid them -- you'll remember that St. Louis ranked number eight on Central Connecticut State University's list of Most Literate Cities for 2011. The CCSU rankings are based not on book sales by one entity, but on our access to libraries (we were number two in that category) and book stores, of which we have many. St. Louis additionally had one of the highest donor rates in the country for World Book Night.

What I'm saying is that we don't need Amazon to go through the pretense of making this list (which is really just a delivery vector for their suggested summer reading lists) to tell us we read a lot. We're too busy reading to pay attention anyway.