Quote:
Originally Posted by Danny Fekete
I'm against any sort of systematic and mandatory rating or tagging system that's imposed by a sanctioned organization rather than built up by the community. A wikipedia-style catalogue of book tags, with all the internal struggling and sensitivity to consensus would be interesting; an MPAA for books with associated enforcement against potential readers would be horrible.
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I agree.
The problem isn't in making a warnings collection; a group of interested parents & other people could open a Delicious account now and start making book lists with warnings. With a bit of coding skill, they could make a way to print them out; they could take them to their local libraries and request to have all the YA books tagged with whatever labels they like.
And at the small, community level, I'd be in favor of that. A community can decide where its standards for "extreme violence in text" are, without having to push its standards on others.
The problems start when people don't want to have to reference a parent-created website, when they want to foist the content decisions and the labeling issue on to publishers.
I don't mind if other people want labels on their YA books, but I don't want to pay extra for those labels, and I don't want to read them. (Mostly because I suspect they won't warn for the content I try to steer my kids away from.)