Amazon, who commands 55 to 60% of the e-book market, has been in the news as of late concerning its potential involvement behind a Justice Department lawsuit against other e-book suppliers, like Apple and Penguin, for price gouging. If all goes as planned, Amazon will be back to selling new e-book releases for $9.99 without any hassle, which leads to another interesting figure – Lexington, Kentucky has been named the most e-literate city in the United States, according to The Atlantic.
A survey analyzed data from Priceonomics, regarding how many Amazon Kindles and Barnes and Noble Nooks (which essentially make up the e-book market in its entirety) were sold across the nation – and the results were surprising, in that the largest metropolitan areas of the country didn’t make up the top on the list. Coming in at #1 is Lexington, with a population of roughly 296,000.
Chicago was fairly low on the list, and it would appear than there aren’t many people reading in Fresno. The study also showed that cities with a better climate had less readers, and that level of education didn’t seem to play much of a role in e-book readership.
The data is interesting, as one might wonder when there could be time for all of the e-bookery in Lexington – the city recently lost its collective mind as the University of Kentucky Wildcats were getting close to winning NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship this year. One has to be from Lexington to truly understand the true depth of March Madness in the area. National headlines were made with overturned cars being torched, trees “being broke,” people being shot, etc. Besides the amount of e-books being read, the majority of cities in the U.S. also likely don’t have so many horses running through their neighborhoods:
Ah, Lexington. What did Mel Gibson’s William Wallace mention in Braveheart? Something about warrior poets?
Or, Lexington is a college town. The stats make sense, and Ann Arbor and Madison are also high on the list.