Are You Living in a Book Desert?

We all know that a desert is a dry, arid region with harsh conditions for sustaining life. The desert metaphor has been used in many disciplines to describe a lack of resources. For example, a “food desert” is a geographic area where affordable and nutritious food is in scarce supply.

Book deserts illustrated

Unite for Literacy has used the desert metaphor to illustrate the availability of literacy resources in geographic areas. We even developed a book desert map that illustrates the widespread problem of book scarcity and helps to initiate conversations about the impact that has on the lives of children.

In 2014, we introduced the first version of our book desert map at the Clinton Global Initiative—America conference. The map was developed with the help of ESRI, the geographic information system (GIS) experts. We provided Esri with data gleaned from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the U.S. Census Bureau that included a range of prediction variables, like actual book counts, family income, culture, and home language. The resulting map predicted the percentage of households in a geographic area that contain at least 100 books.

In 2023, we worked with the Colorado State University Geospatial Centroid to refine the book desert map. The Centroid team compiled and analyzed data from NAEP, the Census Bureau, and Diversity Data Kids, along with survey responses from more than 10,000 participants in the Unite Growing Readers program. We believe the new map more consistently and accurately identifies how likely households within census tracts are to have an abundance of books when compared to other tracts.