The Publishers Association state that the number of books sold in the UK for 2006 (sorry I couldn’t find the figures for 2005) was 787 million, and National Statistics (census 2001) gives the adult population of the UK at about 45.5 million. This gives a total of just over 17 books bought, per annum, by adults.

That’s quite a large discrepancy, so I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the validity of the Expanding the Book Market sampling methods and data.

The Publishers Association Children’s Book Group is asking for ‘Grants for the Arts’ funding of £5k to assist with Phase 2 of a project to introduce a nationwide scheme to classify children’s books by recommended reading age and content.

It’s nice to see the PA maintained an independent and unbiased view about this important issue before they applied for this funding – they even seem to know the results of phase 1 before it was even started.

The Publishers’ Association have also put together an ‘Age Guidance Document Library‘ you might want to refer to. The Acacia Avenue Data is particularly illuminating and this informed the Newsletter that was circulated about the research.

The budget was £35.5k of which the Arts Council provided £5k.

Having read the administrative stuff in that submission, it struck me how uncritical the Arts Council in London were. You might have thought these things are looked at with a degree of healthy scepticism, well … think again. On the credit side, however, is Mark Robinson, head of the North East part of the Arts Council, who blogged about this topic.

And I hope those links all come out, or I may have to start again …

As an ex-primary teacher, as well as an author, experience tells me there are a lot of very useful ways to give ‘clearer guidance on the suitability of a book for a child’s (reading!!) age’, but branding an actual age category on the book is by far the least helpful and least accurate way of all.

But providing guidance that would truly help adults and children would take time and skill and expertise from publishers.

So, hey, let’s just fling together a cover and blurb with hours to spare before a production deadline…!

There was also solid support for a number of other initiatives such as the ability to find out about authors similar to other writers, clearer guidance on the suitability of a book for a child’s age and more best-seller lists within book genres.

However, at no point do they quantify the level of support, indicate whether age-guidance was part of the questionnaire or if it came up in a comments section at the end. It is also ambiguous if they mean clearer categories within bookshops, or age-guidance printed on books. The other initiatives are all associated with bookshops, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to link clearer guidance with shelf categories and advice points within the bookshop.

“The issue of age-guidance on children’s books came to the fore in 2005 with the publication of the Expanding the Book Market report1, commissioned from the research company Book Marketing Limited (BML) by Arts Council England (ACE) and other funding partners. The report made various recommendations for improved information for readers and book buyers, including the provision of age-guidance on children’s books to encourage gift-buying.”

I must have blinked and missed the bit where the report recommends this… did you find it, Malcolm?

One bit of the report that I particularly liked was that of all the people asked only 1% found it difficult to choose for children*.

*14 non-buyers don’t know what to get/how to choose for children (Table 2.4.3) and 14 light or medium buyers found it difficult to choose for children (Table 2.5.4), which gives 28 people of the original 2000 sample.