Lets consider the source: Amazon A Great Place to Cry at Your Desk Dot Com.
Let's consider the source: Amazon "A Great Place to Cry at Your Desk" Dot Com. vgajic via iStock

Check out this horrible regurgitated press release from the bottom-dwellers at Amazon, over at the BusinessWire. Emphasis mine. Also talk about RUDE:

Today, Amazon.com revealed their annual list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities across the U.S., just in time for summer reading season. The ranking is determined by a compilation of sales data from cities with more than 500,000 residents on a per capita basis and includes purchases of all books, magazines and newspapers in both Kindle and print format from April 2015 to April 2016.

The Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Seattle, Wash.

2. Portland, Ore.

I'm not printing the rest of the list, because it can't possibly be accurate, leading with an EGREGIOUS error like that. There is simply no way that Portland is an inferior town for readers than the city that Amazon ruined (I can say that because I grew up there, AND ALSO BECAUSE IT'S TRUE. Farewell, scrappy frontierland of my youth; hello, playground for the rich).

You might think this is a case of sour grapes, but come on. Let's consider the source: Amazon "A Great Place to Cry at Your Desk" Dot Com. Now let's consider the metric: Oh yeah, it's SALES—not library use, or author reading attendance, or the presence and health of small presses, or, you know, anything not directly connected to Amazon's bottom line.

Remember: Portland is the city of Powell's. It's where the long-shot candidate for city council who makes it through the primary owns an independent bookstore that specializes in small press comics and zines. It's a place where small presses can afford (for now) to operate, where you can make your own perfect-bounds 'n' broadsides at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. And if you're looking for an answer to cool-kid writer-saturated Brooklyn, it's also the west coast home of fucking TIN HOUSE, OKAY? Ursula K. LeGuin lives here! OURS IS THE STATE OF WILLIAM STAFFORD, GOD DAMN IT. And a metric ton of moderately famous authors who are probably ALL mad at me right now because I'm not listing them one by one because that would take forever.

I guess not even Amazon has a metric for everything.