And those numbers paint an interesting picture.īlue state stalwarts New York, Massachusetts, and Maine are all over Hillary Clinton’s new campaign memoir, What Happened, but fellow blue state California is passing Clinton over in favor of delving into the aforementioned Manson’s self-help title The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. But it does tell us which books are being read right now by people who read at a high enough volume to use a subscription service. So this data doesn’t tell us which books are absolutely the most popular of all time for every state in the US. (Electric Literature has a great overview of what happened here.) That’s because romance fans go through books so voraciously that before the company restricted the genre, they essentially made Scribd’s business model insupportable.

That’s not an unreasonable sample size - Scribd says that more than 100 million readers actively use its service every month - but it does mean that the sample we’re working with is limited to people who self-selected into a subscription reading service, rather than the general population.Īnd although romance fans are generally some of the most prolific readers in the country, Scribd has intentionally structured its service so that it’s harder to read romance than it is to read other genres.

This data is also specific to Scribd’s readers. The result is a snapshot rather than a detailed portrait, and as such, it’s heavily weighted toward new releases.

Scribd works more or less like Netflix for books, allowing readers to pay a set subscription fee for access to a library of electronic titles ( with a few catches), and in celebration of National Author’s Day, Scribd sent Vox its data for which books are most popular in every state in the US.īefore we dive into the numbers, some caveats: This data does not measure which books are the most popular of all time, but instead, which books were most popular from October 1 through October 18 of this year. Kentucky loves a romance, Alaska is here for some science fiction, and everyone seems to love blogger Mark Manson.Īt least that’s what the user data from Scribd, the reading subscription service, suggests. Arkansas and Washington, DC, love The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, but Pennsylvania and Virginia are more into Stephen King.

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