Book Rating System

Exactly What It Says on the Tin

What do you all think about the idea of putting a rrating system on books, similar to the system on Tv, Movies and Video games. A system that would judge them on their appropriateness, run by a government office or some kind of internal group.

I personally think it is an absolutely horrible idea. More than half of the books in a given high school library or high school class room would carry an equivalent of a mature rating, and I could see things going very Fahrenheit 451 quickly with all the moral guardians and Fox News types up in arms about books that were taught to children for ages.

But what do you guys think?

edited 27th Apr '11 9:54:18 PM by Vyctorian

It certainly makes a lot of sense to me - after all, why should books get a free pass when movies and videogames are so regulated?

Of course, someone is going to have to go around reading the books to decide their rating, so we'd need new organisations to do that.

I suppose it depends on how well you think the current ratings systems are enforced/enacted, in regards to movies or video games.

But, and I do stress this, there is one major difference between books and movies/video games.

Movies/video games can be watched or played by virtually anyone.

Books? Not everyone can read complex books. Most books that deal with adult issues are written for adults, and the very same people who, according to some, shouldn't be reading them-can't read them.

If you don't know what the word means, it's not hurting anyone if you read it. If you do, it's unlikely to hurt anything to read it either. Hence, a rating system for books is unnecessary.

No. I want The Color Purple to stay in my school library.

It seems to be a waste of time to me. Unlike games and books, immature children likely won't stick around long enough with books with mature themes.

edited 27th Apr '11 10:38:55 PM by Ecktor

"It certainly makes a lot of sense to me - after all, why should books get a free pass when movies and videogames are so regulated?"

Because the dumbass prude housewives behind the MPAA thankfully aren't literary-minded enough.

We've moved away from book-banning. Let's not regress.

Who said anything about banning books?

I don't really think books should be censored, but I also think video games and movies are too heavily rated. It was an interesting case with my intermediate (sixth and seventh grade) school. They banned Twilight for being to mature for us twelve year olds (which is fine with me), but they had this one book that I can't remember the name of that I came across which had surprising amounts of swearing and violence.

^^ I believe I did.

edited 27th Apr '11 11:06:20 PM by kashchei

Perhaps I should rephrase.

Nice slippery slope there.

edited 27th Apr '11 11:13:51 PM by zoulza

Hi! I'm one of the major "proponents" on rating books. But it's mostly for satire. Kinda. I think that all cultural works should be treated in the same way, with no medium given special treatment over another. If something seems off about ratings on books, then it should be equally off about ratings on movies or video games.

I actually support the idea of non-enforced ratings as a best case scenario. They would be used simply for parental notification and nothing more. That said, the chances of that happening are slim and none. So I think our real-world best case scenario is no ratings. It's a This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things situation. But if people insist on ratings then it's only by keeping them consistent across all media that we can really get a good look at what they really mean.

"Ohai, I'm a parent of a high schooler. My daughter just brought home A Separate Peace, which looked like a nice book, it had lovely boys on the front and looked like a nice classic piece of literature. But then I looked at the rating sticker on the front and saw that it had HOMOSEXUAL THEMES! How can they let such filth into my daughter's library? I'm going to start a chapter of Parents Against Gross Education and lobby the school board to remove books with 'racy' ratings from the library. They should be reading the classics, not this disgusting smut."

I can actually see this happening.

In principle, I'd say it was a great idea - if we lived in a world where Moral Guardians weren't already looking for any excuse to ban books from school libraries.

In practice, I think it would be dreadful.

I don't see why we should let books off easy.

Don't think of this like MPAA ratings—think of it like the content warnings on violent or sexually explicit manga that get exported to America. Some books are way, way more gruesome than the cover makes them look. That said, this would have to be a voluntary, small-scale system—there simply aren't the resources available to rate every book that gets published.

I don't see why not, we have ratings on everything else.

This would be helpful for schools and such. I remember flipping through this rather... horrific book on pirates that I found in the library of my sister's elementary school.

It featured *pictures* (Ohhhh!) of all kinds of wonderful highlights, such as torture, gorn, nudity, gorn, Ludicrous Gibs, gorn, murder, gorn, etc, gorn...

That book SHOULD NOT be in a place where it is rented out by 7 year olds.

Guys, you're missing the point.

In all likelihood, if the person can read and understand the "racy" subjects present in the book, they're already mature enough to read it.

Think about reading smut if you didn't know what sex was already. It wouldn't be racy, because you would have no idea what it was about.

Then you add onto that the higher reading difficulty levels usually associated with mature content, and it seems unlikely someone reading a book is truly reading something "inappropriate" for them.

I'm okay. The only art work I can think of that deserves banning is Shakespeare. Everything else just needs a warning.

Dang, you just really hate Shakespeare, don't you? His stuff was mild and had just a bit older English than we use today, plus, there's been plenty of other people that have done much more graphic or "adult" themes in their writing before him and after him.

I would put a rating on this sort of stuff, but then I remember the sort of books that actually meant something to me when I was young and they were all recommended for students in higher grades and even college students due to their controversy (most books aren't hard to read, but big). On the other hand, I also think that books get unfair treatment in this area that media should be, on a whole, treated only as media by ratings, not as individual forms of media.

Then I see something like Bulletstorm and I figure... what do I even know anyway? How are you supposed to rate something in the first place (if you even should) when there's no numerical way to analyze it.

Gay.

Quite so.

There's more to content than sex, and there are certainly books that can be understood by children who aren't necessarily old enough to handle them. Case in point: The House Of The Scorpion.

Don't we have a "no spoilers in the description" rule? It might be a good idea to warn kids about things with Paranoia Fuel. Animorphs made me paranoid for a while, but I suspect most Puppeteer Parasite stuff will do that.

Never read that book, but looking at the trope page I'm not seeing what could even be horribly objectionable about that book.

If it's just the killing and drugs, I think kids could read that by the time they're about 8. Though the worst of it might not even make any sense until they're in their teens.

I mean, shit, I read Catch-22 when I was 10, and that book has some fucked up stuff in it-but most kids wouldn't be able to read that in a technical sense much younger than that. In the "understanding what's going on" sense I had to read it again when I was older anyways.

If you want to leave voluntarily, then you're not insane and must remain in the forces. If you do voluntarily go into the forces anyway, you're insane but medically considered sane.

Fun times.