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Children's column - time for a new solution to age-banding Print E-mail
Children's
Written by Nicolette Jones   
Friday, 12 December 2008 11:35

Since eight organisations, from CILIP to Seven Stories, have added their support to Anne Fine’s and Philip Pullman’s anti-age-banding campaign, surely it is time to move the debate on. Some publishers have believed that age-banding helps the consumer at the point of purchase; 820 authors (online) have objected that it will cause readers to be both discouraged and discriminated against. Now is the moment to get beyond this impasse and to find an alternative.

Compromise ideas – a wraparound band, for instance, which can be removed after purchase – are too expensive. Publishers want the guidance to be printed on the jackets themselves. The answer is surely to print an un-age-ranged indication of content.

Some publishers already do this: a phrase or two to stop buyers acquiring for eight-year-olds books only appropriate for teens. Bloomsbury’s The Traitor Game, for example, by B R Collins, has “Contains strong language and some scenes not suitable for younger readers” on the jacket. Admirable. An alternative, perhaps, would be a classification system as used in the movies – avoiding the 15 and 18 categories, but, say, reverting to U, PG, A and maybe AA.(I am assuming that anything X-rated is probably not a children’s book.) In the cinema, children are not ashamed to watch down a category – High School Musical, for instance, is a U, but this does not diminish its popularity with 14-year-olds. So the stigma would be removed, without losing a sense of the potential audience.

After all, it is content rather than sophistication of writing that gives age-banding any point. Parents have long made the mistake of buying, say, Jacqueline Wilson’s Girls in Love/Under Pressure/Out Late/In Tears for seven-year-olds who are good readers, simply because the language is not beyond them, when the content is more suited to early teens. Even then emotional maturity is as various as reading ability. A note on the jacket that said: “About dating issues/anorexia/online paedophiles” would work, but might spoil some of the suspense. However, a certificate as above would be as helpful as any age band.

 

In the meantime, knowledgeable booksellers and librarians continue to be the best guides of all.

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adele geras
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written by adele geras, December 12, 2008
There are very many ways to indicate whether or not a book is suitable for this or that age group. Typography and layout usually work but in the case of Jacqueline Wilson, the Nick Sharratt look may give a misleading impression. The blurb OUGHT to give some idea of what the book's about without revealing the plot but the main thing is a well-informed readership or buyership which will become harder and harder to achieve if newspapers cut back on their reviewing of children's books. Some literary editors are being made redundant and you can't help feeling that if anything has to go, it'll be the children's books. I do hope I'm wrong about this!
Nicholas Jones
Analogy with Audiobooks
written by Nicholas Jones, December 12, 2008
Quite agree: age-banding is beneficial only in that it removes the need for knowledgeable booksellers who can 'hand-sell' to enquiring customers; supermarkets etc. who have 'merchandised' book ranges also need simple classifications so the shelves can be classified. So the demand for age-banding is a consequence of the dumbing-down of bookselling. However, the wider availability of books to those who don't go into bookshops is a good thing, and so if we have to accept that age-banding could be useful for this new part of the market, maybe the answer is stickers. Audiobooks, which I produce, have had age-guidance for some while when it is not obvious (and the audio suitability is often different from that for the books they are readings of); we also put language and content warning on some titles (usually adult ones!). But we routinely add stickers to books (usually picture ones) to indicate who the reader is when they are book-and-CD sets. The total cost of that is a few pence, and that is where we are running individual stickers for particular titles; if the whole industry got together and did generic age-band stickers by the tens of thousands, they would be cheap. Affixing them is an automated process (at least is is for CDs, and I'm sure the machinery could be adapted to binding lines). And the public is used to jackets plastered with 3-for-2 stickers.

Maybe this is a practical way forward (though I remain opposed to the idea).

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