One Book, Two Book, Red Book, Blue Book

Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 10, 2008

As usual, this election is suffering from a two-sets-of-facts problem. Democratic voters know one batch of data, and Republicans another, and only rarely the twain shall meet.

But lest we educated, well-informed readers of reason get on our high horses about the stupidity of people who get their facts from partisan cable news and talk radio, take a look at these charts showing political book buying patterns.

They're from the work of social networking big thinker Valdis Krebs, who used Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought..." feature to gather his data.

That's right: Even folks with book learnin' can't get out of the partisan ghettos. This has been true for years, as the first version of this chart, assembled in 2003, shows. Note that the only linking book is ironically titled What Went Wrong?