Age banding in the UK
In early June, we wrote about an issue that was just beginning to make waves in the UK. The Publishers’ Association has slightly modified their stance on the age banding of books since then, but the issue just won’t go away.
The No to Age Banding website now has a very impressive list of signatories and is inviting anyone with an interest – TL, teacher, librarian, author, illustrator, parent – who disagrees with the age banding concept to add their name. British books arriving here will, of course, have these age bands on the cover.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for posting this – I just went over there and signed up, then followed it up with a few choice comments.
When I was young adult there was a range of paperbacks with either a red, green or blue dragon on the front & back covers, as well as the suggested reading age. Nobody I knew would be seen dead reading one of these books outside their own narrow age group.
As for my own stuff, it was written for adults, is marketed to ages 14+ and is read on the sly by kids 9 or 10 years old. (My own 10-year-old daughter just polished off all four of my novels over the past few weeks.) If age banding declared the books as 14+ titles, adults wouldn’t read them, and neither would younger kids.