Books don't need a classification system

My son's 14 years old. This morning he's seen the headline of an article on ABC News from the Behind the News team by reporter Michelle Wakim: Films and video games have age classifications. Should books? 

His voice dropped a couple of octaves immediately. "Books don't need a classification system!" He said, with a calm but firm voice. Clearly a visceral answer to a headline.

But here's the thing. I agree with him. 

They've tried book challenges and bans in Australia but it hasn't worked. I feel like conservative forces are pivoting now. We saw the success of an Australian group in putting pressure to credit card companies to erase lots of games from Steam and itch.io. The success in manufacturing a frenzy through Newscorp's media and the government responding with the ill conceived Social Media Child Protection Act. And I feel they'll be attempting a 'debate' on books and their content next. They may present this as 'concerns about domestic abuse' in books or simply wanting a debate, not bans but I don't buy it. The result of all this will be that some books exploring themes outside the established norm will not be published or will be rendered invisible. That is their goal.

“Caution” by Quinn Dombrowski is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Flickr)

I haven't given this much thought. This is a gut reaction to the article above after all but I feel there are a few things to consider. 

First of all the system that we have works well. There may be little issues here and there that we could nitpick(for example, books classified for adults such as American Psycho and The Boys, being totally banned in Queensland), but it works. Let's be honest, how would a formal classification system work? It would be impossible to read every book. Simply not feasible and there are other signifIcant problems with a classification system for books. 

A classification system would result in some books not being able to be sold in Australia. Indie, niche and self publishers would not be able to afford the classification fees. Without a formal classification, they would not be able to sell the book. And the book industry can't compare to the amount of money and profit margins of the film and video game industries. A classification system would be an unbearable financial burden to the industry.

Classification would also act as a deterrent for publishers with texts that deal with themes that could be a challenge. This would result in soft censorship by publishers to authors and self censorship from authors themselves. We've seen this play out in movies and video games before. I would hate to see it happen in books.

The system we have may not be perfect but it's worked for so long. We can't let conservative forces precipitate a debate like this and we better stay vigilant. We definitely don't want to go back to the Australia of censorship, the Australia that banned all horror movies and set up Literature Review Boards to censor books and comics, just to cite two examples. Hopefully, those days are over. But we cannot be complacent. 

In the meantime, this is the only classification system for books that I would support: