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The literary scene in the Bay Area is certainly active but how do we rank nationally? Today the annual list from Central Connecticut State University came out, and the results were mixed.
Overall, San Francisco placed at #6 on the national list, Oakland scraped by at #37 and San Jose was only #50.5, out of a total of 75 locations.
On the plus side, all three cities scored high on access to the internet — it was a three-way tie for the third place behind Washington D.C. (What does it mean to score highly on internet literacy? The researchers tabulated the number of unique visitors and overall clicks to a "city's internet version newspaper" as well as online book orders.) Education levels were also fairly high in Bay Area cities — San Jose was #31 and S.F. was #13 in terms of citizens with high school or college degrees.
In terms of the number of booksellers, though, the Bay Area did not do well — S.F. came in at #21.5, Oakland was #38, San Jose was #68.5, and poor Stockton, CA came in dead last.
Also hurting the Bay Area was their newspaper ranking—how many papers circulating for the population. Only S.F. was in the top half of the chart, as Oakland and San Jose tied for #55.5.
What does this tell us? California as a whole did not do well on the survey — Stockton was at the bottom overall, for instance. Since the study began in 2005, S.F.'s ranking has flucuated, but it has generally ranked in the top ten.
Nationwide, experts called the results grim as the amount people have been reading has dropped over the past decade. As researcher Jack Miller told USA Today, "What difference does it make how good your reading test score is if you never read anything?"
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
Mark Pritchard
If I read this right, it seems they didn't include ebooks and e-readers in their survey at all. Unfortunately that market might begin to be more important statistically than the number of bookstores.
ml b
There are broad assumptions that the results of this survey accurately reflect the Cities in a comparison nationally. In looking at the list of Cities ranked, it appears that we have several Cities in California including Stockton, Riverside, etc., and yet, very poor representation of Cities in States of the Northeast...none in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, etc.. Please provide the criteria on which Cities are selected and whatever else you can to show exactly what we can conclude from the results...all I can conclude from the list is that the Cities rank where they do when compared to the other Cities selected which probably cannot be generalized to refelect rankings among all the major Cities of the U.S.
Holly Brady
Just because we have fewer bookstores and fewer print newspapers in circulation here doesn't mean that we're reading less. It means that we're moving quicker than the East Coast to new digital ways of gathering information.
Think about it. Are you spending more or less time reading than--say--five years ago? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
U Ragazzu
Regarding the number of bookstores, one must take into account the enormity of some in the Bay Area: City Lights, Moe's, and Green Apple each have three floors. And the latter is contained in two separate storefronts.