It might have seemed that the local tech community had reason to be proud this week when Seattle tied for first place with Minneapolis in a new ranking of the country's most literate cities. After all, Internet readership was one of the main categories used in the Central Connecticut State University study, and we like to think of our region as one the most tech-savvy in the country.

But the real reason is much more low-tech than that.

As it turns out, the number of traditional bookstores is what put the city at the top. Seattle tied for first with San Francisco in that category, which took into account the number of retail bookstores per capita, among other measures. Seattle actually came in  seventh in the Internet category, which measured Internet book orders and traffic on the Web sites of the city's newspapers.

From the study, here's the top 10 in the Internet reading category. As you can see, cities including sunny Austin and San Diego are inexplicably among those that ranked ahead of Amazon.com's rainy hometown. Then again, maybe blog-centric Seattle is disadvantaged by the study's focus on online newspaper readership.