World Cities Culture Forum collects culture related data from large cities across the world. The organization publishes the data annually as statistics that describe what kind of cultural services the cities have and how citizens use them. One of the published statistics compares the number of bookstores and public libraries against the city population.

The World Cities Culture Forum organization comprises 32 cities that collect and share data on the role of the cities in the future, services the cities provide, and how the cities are administered. The Forum only collects and publishes information on cities that are members of the organization. The participating cities are listed here.

As we can see in the table below, Asian cities tend to have more bookstores per capita than cities in other continents.

	City	Bookstores per 100 000 inhabitants	Year
1	Hong Kong	21	2014
2	Taipei	17.6	2014
3	Madrid	16	2014
4	Shanghai	16	2014
5	Toronto	13.9	2015
6	New York	10	2015
7	Sydney	9.4	2015
8	Paris	9	2015
9	Seoul	9	2015
10	Austin	8.2	2015
11	Melbourne	8	2015
12	Shenzhen	6.6	2014
13	Amsterdam	6	2014
14	Moscow	5	2014
15	London	4	2015
16	Stockholm	3.2	2014
17	Singapore	3	2014
18	Istanbul	1	2015

 

The number of libraries per capita is bigger in Europe than in other continents.

	City	Libraries per 100 000 inhabitants	Year
1	Edinburgh	60.5	2015
2	Warsaw	11.4	2014
3	Brussels	10	2015
4	Paris	9.2	2014
5	Seoul	6	2014
6	Shenzhen	5.9	2014
7	Vienna	5.9	2014
8	Hong Kong	4.2	2015
9	London	4.2	2014
10	Moscow	4.2	2014
11	Toronto	3.9	2015
12	Melbourne	3.4	2015
13	Amsterdam	3.3	2014
14	Sydney	3.3	2015
15	New York	2.7	2015
16	Taipei	1.8	2014
17	Rome	0.8	2014
18	Singapore	0.5	2014
19	Istanbul	0.4	2014
20	Dubai	0.3	2015