The most literate cities will surprise you! – A national survey measures a key component in America’s social health by ranking the culture and resources for reading in America’s largest cities, and two of them are in the same state.
The study identifies the top reading cities in this order: Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington D.C., St. Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Portland.
Jack Miller, who conducted the study, finds that cities in the US are less literate than similar cities in Europe and he attributes much of this to the decline of US newspapers. Miller notes that cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; that cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and that cities with newspapers with high per capita circulation rates also have a high proportion of people reading newspapers online.
“Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy,” according to Miller. “A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy?one doesn’t cancel out another.” In other words, people who read websites on the internet ALSO read books (heck, we could have told them that!)
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
The most popular books on our website are the two we publish ourselves? The Path and The Key. If you haven’t read one, or both, of them yet, 2009 is the year to start, and you get a discount when you order both of them at the same time. Subscribers get an EVEN BIGGER discount!
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