In a recent post, the Daily Beast broke down book sales by city to provide a "glimpse into the American mind-set in 2009."
The analysis uses data from Nielsen BookScan, "which gathers point-of-sale book data from more than 13,000 locations across the U.S. Their data provider list includes all major booksellers, Internet retailers, and food and other non-traditional book-selling stores," according to the methodology.
Overall, "conservative publishing shows no sign of slackening with Mark Levin, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck on numerous lists throughout the country. Liberals could only boast the strong showing of [Sen. Ted] Kennedy's memoir," according to their analysis of the 16 largest metro areas in the U.S.
While in California the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose region eschewed the Glenn Beck tome, Sarah Palin and Mark Levin cracked the top 10 for the metro area. Los Angeles had all three titles in their top 10.
Makes you wonder what the library card data would would show. Do liberals stick to the library?
For the most part, book-buying looked pretty similar in both Los Angeles and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metro area.
One interesting difference is that the 2010 edition of the Guinness World Records cracked the top 10 in LA, while the Bay Area folks picked up french cooking with Julia Child.
Take a look at the top 10 lists for the whole country to see what books people were shelling out the cash for in 2009.
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