As some of you will know, there’s a huge fuss going on in the UK at the moment about a plan by some publishers to put stickers on children’s books indicating what age of reader the book is aimed at. I’ve just been invited to join a Facebook group protesting about this, and right now I’m not going to. I thought I would share my reasons.
The case of the anti-age-banding lobby is set out on their web site. Something that struck me about it is that it claims the stickers will be:
highly unlikely, despite the claims made by those publishers promoting the scheme, to make the slightest difference to sales.
No evidence is provided for this. It is just stated as a fact. I know a lot of writers (and a lot of fans) who are pretty clueless about marketing, so I’d like to see some evidence for this claim. Especially as Mr. Hornswoggler had been characteristically forthright on the subject.
But the main reason that I’m not signing up is that the whole thing appears to be a storm in a teacup. To start with it is nothing new. Go into any major bookstore and look in the children’s section. You’ll find the books shelved by age group. They are already being age-banded by stores. How is having a sticker going to change things? Besides, while I don’t have many kids’ books here I can check, I am pretty sure I have seen “suitable for ages xxx” on books before, and on toys, and on anything else kids might want to get their hands on.
What appears to be the problem is that the protest is based on an assumption of an authoritarian society that cannot be resisted. Children will be afraid to read books for the “wrong” age. Over-protective parents won’t let children buy books for the “wrong” age. I haven’t yet seen someone claim that kids will be required to produce ID cards in stores before they are allowed to buy a book, just in case they try to buy one that they are “not allowed” to have, but the whole protest reeks of that sort of idea.
When I was a kid, my parents were intensely proud of the fact that I was reading books above my age group, and so was I. When I was a little older there used to be girls’ magazines with silly names like Just 17 and Over 21, and the one thing that every teenage girl knew was that you shouldn’t even be seen dead reading a magazine that was “age appropriate”, you always read one for an age group above where you were.
So why not give the kids (and the parents) a bit of respect. Allow the stupid publishers to age-band the books, because it will give kids a chance to learn civil disobedience at a very young age. That, surely, is a good thing.
As for authors, maybe their energies would be better spent protesting about something else, like Amazon’s sales tactics.
I remember vividly an incident from when I was in the second or third grade. I was then (as I am now) a speedy and omnivorous reader, and reading quite a bit past my grade level. One day I was not allowed to check out a book because the librarian thought it was “too old” for me.*
My mother was so furious she stormed the principal’s office to make it clear that whatever books her children wished to borrow they should be allowed to borrow.
She also ended up working as a volunteer librarian there for a while.
The only time I remember her suggesting I not read something was when I picked up her copy of “The Godfather.” She said that I could read it if I wanted, but a lot of it wouldn’t make any sense at all to me until I was a bit older. (I’m glad I took her advice; it was required reading for a university course and I most definitely would not have enjoyed it had I read it as a child.)
*It is possible this particular incident involved my younger brother rather than me, but it still made a deep impression on me.
I was in the children’s section of a major bookseller here in Berlin today, and saw for the first time what real agebanding is: the groups are set at every two years and also classified by whether girl or boy appropriate. I think that’s absolutely terrible. Great for girls who read ahead of their level (as I did, but certainly not here!- I was looking for myself as well as my children), but boys won’t read books branded for girls and how embarassing tobe reading a book banded for 9 year olds if you are 12. Even if it’s a great book and you enjoy it.
I think it’s a bad idea.
G – That’s very interesting. You see, the major publishers are completely multinational these days. I’m pretty sure that at least one is German-owned. So I doubt that they are proposing this change for the UK in a vacuum. They have probably looked at what banding does for sales in Germany and decided that they want to do that everywhere.
Now of course we Brits like to think that we are less susceptible to social regimentation than our German friends, but that may be a hangover from the unpleasantness of the previous century, so I’ll try to avoid saying anything inappropriate. I’ll just note that the more rigid the banding the more likely it is that everyone will find it stupid and ignore it.
As to the other points, I agree that it is embarrassing for a kid who is slow at reading to have to read books of a lower age, but kids are not stupid. They know who is slow, and they know how difficult books are. They will persecute kids who are slow readers regardless of whether those books are banded or not. If parents are concerned, they could always try taking the stickers off, or forging stickers for different age groups.
As to gender banding, again it already happens. If publishers want to aim a book at girls they just put a girl on the cover. Just try getting a boy to read a book that only has girls on the cover and see how far you get.
There is a difference between shelving books by age and banding them.
Books shelved by age shift all the time. DWJ can appear anywhere and I am sometimes very amused by which ones end in “children’s”. If you want children to read up, believe me the mad decisions of book shops achieves this very well.
Banding is carried around all the time. Despite your comments, it has in fact been tried before. When I was a child there was a set of books called Dragon books and Horse books. I am not sure which publisher it was.
The dragon books were fantasy and had a little dragon in the right hand corner, the horse books were realism and had a little horse.
Those dragons and horses, and the covers, were colour coded. I’m hazy now, but I think blue for the oldest children, green for middle and red for the youngest readers.
If I were stupid enough to read a red book in public I got comments from parent, from teachers, from dumb relatives, you name it….
These covers were dropped in part as publishers changed their minds as to who their market was. I got a student to do this observation for me… parents may hand over the cash, but they are no longer the ones doing the actual buying.
I am *utterly* against a return to this. Yes, it’s bad enough books are age streamed in the bookshops, but reifying it is making things worse.
Thank you. I was pretty sure this sort of thing went on when I was a kid, but my memory was hazy so I didn’t want to say for sure.
It doesn’t seem to have scarred us for life, though. I got unpleasant comments too, but mainly because I read books, not because of any particular books I read.
Yet at some point publishers stopped doing it, presumably because they felt it wasn’t working for them. The thing I find oddest about the whole fuss is the assumption that publishers are doing this to prevent kids from reading books. I’m pretty sure they are doing it because they think it will help them sell more books, which will mean more kids reading, which is a good thing. If it doesn’t do that they’ll stop.
So they way to prevent this from happening is to provide good, clear evidence that it will result in a fall in book sales. If you can do that, the publishers will be the first to sign up for the campaign to stop banding.
Cheryl,
There’s a misapprehension in your first sentence that goes to the heart of this argument. The proposal is not about putting stickers on books, it’s about printing an age (eg 9+) on the back of the book near the bar code. The point about stickers is that they can be removed, and some at least of the authors involved would be able to live with that. I should know, I run the web site and see the arguments going to and fro.
As the number of supporters passed the 2000 mark, we had 419 librarians and library assistants, 191 teachers, 90 booksellers and 58 editors on that list. The librarians and teachers are far more attuned to what books are appropriate for which child than book marketeers, who are responding to the major supermarkets who want something easy for the shelf-stackers. The research did not involve talking to either librarians or teachers. If you have a child who is behind on their reading, then you do not want to draw attention to this by having an indelible age rating printed on the book. Stickers can and will be removed.
Another group writing in has been parents of dyslexic children who are making the same point about stigmatising the slower reader, alongside parents of autistic children some of whom are reading years ahead of the norm for their age.
I think Farah’s got it right when she draws the distinction between where books are shelved and what’s printed on them. There’s a vast range of children’s books out there (though I’m sure the supermarkets and some publishers would like to sell more of a fewer number of titles). Without the age banding on the back, children will be freer to read what’s right for them and, unless it’s a well-known book, their peers will have one fewer clue that they are reading something outside the usual fare for their age.
Roger, the stickers thing came straight from the group on Facebook. It says, right up front, that your campaign is, “to stop publishers’ intentions to put stickers on the front of books to recommend reading ages.”
You might want to have a word with them.
And you are right: printed age bands are worse than stickers are worse than shelving.
If you have teachers, librarians and booksellers on board, those are the people you need to make your case. If you can make an argument that this is bad for kids and bad for book sales, everyone will be with you. The campaign should not be about author X’s right to determine what goes on the cover of his book.
Thanks for pointing that out: I have asked them to change the wording. The facebook group has been set up independently of the main campaign: they did it and then told us about it. Whilst we welcome the support (obviously) we aren’t responsible for the content of this facebook group.
Roger:
…the major supermarkets who want something easy for the shelf-stackers.
Yes — they’d like to be able to sell books to people who want to buy books, in a place where people and books already are. Pardon me if I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Helping people find books that they might like is good. Deliberately making it harder for those people to find books is bad. Try that one on for size.
The research did not involve talking to either librarians or teachers.
No, it apparently involved talking to people who buy books, as it should have. Librarians and teachers are not the primary decision-makers in this situation — they’re interested parties, but their voices should not be heard over those who are actually buying books.
Librarians and teachers are also gatekeepers, people with specialized knowledge — of course they don’t want to see the power of that knowledge lessened.
If you have a child who is behind on their reading, then you do not want to draw attention to this by having an indelible age rating printed on the book.
Because there are reading cops on every corner checking kids’ reading material? I’d heard that the UK was turning into an Orwellian surveillance society, but I thought it hadn’t quite gotten that bad.
This is just paranoia; surely the covers of books offer much greater scope for teasing, if teasing isto happen. Are you also calling for all books to be sold with identical, dark-colored covers with no type, so that no book can ever “call attention” to its reader?
Another group writing in has been parents of dyslexic children who are making the same point about stigmatising the slower reader, alongside parents of autistic children some of whom are reading years ahead of the norm for their age.
Let me paraphrase: some people are ahead, and others are behind, but everyone needs to appear to be exactly the same or else unspecified horrible things will happen.
How autocratic are you expecting this system to be? Are you truly worried that a 10-year-old will be forbidden to buy a book marked “Ages 6-9,” or that a greek chorus of taunting children will instantly appear the moment he does so?
Without the age banding on the back, children will be freer to read what’s right for them and, unless it’s a well-known book, their peers will have one fewer clue that they are reading something outside the usual fare for their age.
How are these children “freer” to find anything when they have less information? It seems to me that they’ll be more likely to flail about, finding books too hard or too easy for themselves.
This whole campaign is ridiculously focused on the supposedly glass-fragile self-esteem of children reading books with numbers on them lower than their current age. If the kids of the UK are that emotionally fragile, they need a lot more than the lack of age-banding — they need powerful medication and/or immediate hospitalization.
You also seem to be assuming that there will always be instantly available a wonderfully astute and vastly well-read bookseller/librarian, able to intuit precisely what book will be absolutely perfect for Wee L’il Gareth and place it into his little fist. That is simply not true — kids, and the adults who buy and select books for them, will need to make their own decisions most of the time, and age-banding gives them another very useful piece of information to make that decision with.
Andrew:
Because there are reading cops on every corner checking kids’ reading material? I’d heard that the UK was turning into an Orwellian surveillance society, but I thought it hadn’t quite gotten that bad.
I don’t think the issue is one of adult “reading cops” but rather that of teasing and bullying, which are genuine problems. I was one of those kids who would rather read than play sports, or at recess (since we were *expected* to play) more likely to be playing on the bars or jumping rope with the girls than getting mangled trying to play football with the bigger boys (and they were all bigger boys; I was tiny), so I have plenty of personal experience in the US with the power of that social pressure.
Age-sorting on the shelves is fine (in fact, it made it easier for me because I’d head for the section one age-group up), but leave the big numerical age markers off the covers, please.
At one time the Dr. Seuss books had minor differences in the way the Cat in the Hat logo was printed on the spine of a book, to make it easy for parents to spot the beginner books on the shelf. They were not, however, easily distinguishable from further away.