Just Wondering...Where is a Book's Right "Home"?

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

This post by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian and YSS Board Member Susie Menk explores questions about how we deal with the increasing number of books published only as paperbacks - and whether a book's location in the youth collection should be decided by format or reading level. And she's wondering....what do you think? 

Recently I have been cataloging a wide variety of books and have come across a conundrum.  What are we to do with paperback fiction books?  Now I’m not talking about the simple chapter books like Choose Your Own Adventure or Rainbow Fairies.  I’m talking about trade paperback books.  Books that if they were hardcover publications, would automatically go in the Youth Fiction section, not the paperback section. 

Publishers are coming out with more and more books in paperback formats.  What do you do with the books that are between 200 and 300 pages, but are paperback?  Do you put them in with the early chapter paperback books or do you catalog them as youth fiction and put them in the hardcover section?

This has been an ongoing conversation at my library.  What constitutes a paperback?  Is it simply whether the cover is soft or hard or is it the type of book it is?  Does page length matter? Subject matter? Reading level?  Do we keep longer books in the paperback spinners or put them on the shelves with youth fiction?  Where does the paperback novel go?

One of the practices that I have found that differs greatly between adult shelving and youth shelving is that youth has so many more categories than adult because youth books are categorized more by reading level than anything else. 

In our adult section we have a paperback area, but it focuses mostly on romance paperbacks.  Anything that is a trade paperback gets put in the fiction section alongside the hardcover books. So what about youth?  Do we look at the reading level, the format or a little bit of both? Here’s an article that comments on the difference between chapter books and middle grade books. 

If we are grouping books together by reading level, should the middle grade books be lumped in with the early chapter books?  So the question really boils down to deciding whether the home location should be designated by reading level or the format. 

What do you do at your library?