[bksvol-discuss] Ramble on children's books

Once again it is summertime, and Nichole is again extremely excited about the 
summer reading contest. The goal is to average at least 2 books today so that 
she can beat last year's total of 140+ the 80 days of the contest. She decided 
this year she was going to start by reading most of the American Girl books 
that she has not already read, so the day before the contest began downloading 
the book onto a thumb drive so she would have easy access during the contest.

It turns out that these books are on many levels, but there is no way to 
differentiate either by classification or page numbers. Many of the early books 
have no page breaks and are listed in searches as 1 or 2 pages and even a 
simple word count can help you since occasionally the pre-content pages have so 
much text that they have more words than some of the shorter books.

I know that engineering has no way to identify reading levels or to split the 
current children or teen categories, but is this something that maybe a 
volunteer would consider making a side project so that potential readers could 
know if it is a beginning reader (under 50 pages) emerging reader (maybe 50-100 
pages) a tweener (100-160ish) or a teen (over 160 or so).  These numbers are 
roughly based on my seeing what comes up for Nichole to read, and of course 
could be discretionary at the reviewers judgment.  Either rough classifications 
listed in long synopsis or closer page counts would be a HUGE start.

Many of the older kids books could use serious clean up and we try to file 
quality reports if we read sections with Nichole, but unfortunately she cannot 
file a quality report and she can read or listen to a book quicker than she can 
describe quality problems to us.  The down side of not being able to talk and 
not being able to type.  Smile.  When something jumps out at us, though, we 
will obviously file a quality report.

With so many great minds here, just thought I would throw it out for ideas. 
Thanks!

Valerie

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