I’ve just been reading through my morning news feeds, and discovered that some publishers have announced they are planning to put “age bands” on children’s books. Come this autumn, children and teen books will be labled much in the same way as films by being labeled 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. This type of categorization is supposed to help the reader choose the most suitable book for them. From the looks of the article, I’m not the only person who thinks this is an absolutely ridiculous idea.

Currently I work in both a bookshop and a library and I often see people who spend a lot of their time debating how suitable a book is because it’s in the children’s section or the teen section. Books are placed in these areas because on the whole that section fits the target audience of a book. But it has very negative effects on who reads the book. Books like Philip Pullmans “His Dark Materials” trilogy is a book that is often put in the “young teens” section of book shop and libraries. However it has proved incredibly popular with younger children and especially adults. But for the adults who don’t look in the children’s sections, they would never find it. The same goes for the Harry Potter books and Terry Pratchett books. These books are enjoyed by a wide range of readers, from young children to adults in their sixties, seventies etc.

If books become labeled according to how suitable they may be, then a book that’s targeted at a thirteen year old may never find its way into an eleven years olds hands, despite the fact that the eleven year old has a reading age of fifteen. The same would work the other way around. Reading in younger generations appears to be on a decline; it’s lost favor to things like computer games and TV. I’ve seen plenty of people get laughed at for reading in their spare time instead of playing computer games, and this new method of “age banding” books is just going to make things worse. In the BBC interview Michael Morpurgo said:

“If you say a book is for a seven-year-old, the nine-year-old is going to be trying to cover it up at the back of the class.”

If children are seen to be reading under their supposed “age band” then they’re going to be a target for ridicule, no matter how good the book in question may be.
2008 is supposed to be the Year of Reading, it would be a shame to finish it off by implementing such a half baked idea, that is going to separate the books from their readers.