The Most Well-Read States in America, Ranked – A Study

Here at Face Dragons, we wanted to find a new way of understanding people’s reading habits across the country. Unfortunately, comparing and finding reliable data on individuals’ reading habits across a whole country is difficult. But with new methodologies, we can better understand who is reading and where.

In this Face Dragons study, we aimed to rank each state using data gathered from what individuals are searching on Google. Which state reads most? Find out below!

To jump straight to the complete list of rankings, click here

Previous studies have used data like the number of libraries or bookstores per capita, but we know that many libraries don’t necessarily mean eyes on books. We wanted to create a study based on individuals’ reading habits. The best method we found for this was analyzing Google Search data.

Google Trends tells us which state searches which terms most. We needed a list of search terms that indicated “intent to read.” Below is the list of terms we used.

Each of these terms indicates that an individual is looking for a book to read:

The top five states searching for each of these search terms were recorded and given a score of 1-5.

We tallied the totals and ranked each state from 1-50. The complete rankings are below.

The Rankings

Rank	Total	State
1	58	Washington D.C.*
2	39	Massachusetts
3	35	Vermont
4	33	Utah
5	27	Maine
6	20	New York
7	19	Oregon
8	15	New Hampshire
9	14	Minnesota
10	14	California
11	13	Wisconsin
12	11	Colorado
13	10	Louisiana
14	10	Oklahoma
15	9	North Dakota
16	8	Iowa
17	8	Indiana
18	8	Washington
19	7	Ohio
20	7	Florida
21	6	South Dakota
22	6	Texas
23	6	Arizona
24	5	Kentucky
25	5	Nebraska
26	5	Pennsylvania
27	5	Wyoming
28	5	New Mexico
29	4	West Virginia
30	4	Idaho
31	3	Montana
32	3	Connecticut
33	3	Hawaii
34	3	Mississippi
35	3	Michigan
36	2	Rhode Island
37	2	Virginia
38	2	Illinois
39	1	Alabama
40	1	Arkansas
41	1	North Carolina
42	1	New Jersey
43	0	Alaska
44	0	Delaware
45	0	Georgia
46	0	Maryland
47	0	Missouri
48	0	Kansas
49	0	Nevada
50	0	Tennessee
51	0	South Carolina