: Is there an alternative to the common genre-system for classifying books? When fiction is marketed, I often see them listed by genre, for e.g.: "fantasy", "science fiction", "mystery", "poetry",

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Sure. Publishers routinely classify books by "frontlist" versus "backlist", that is, new books by well-known others that are expected to sell well for at least a short period of time, versus older books and books by unknown others that may sell but at a slower pace.

Books are routinely classified by the target age group.

Books are classified by when they were written: recent, 20th century, colonial era, middle ages, ancient.

In a totally different sense, books are routinely classified by their binding: paperback versus hardcover, or the method of binding, like perfect binding (glue) versus stiched versus wire, etc.

Bookstores routinely separate out oversized books.

Etc etc.

There are all sorts of classification schemes. No classification scheme is inherently right or wrong or even good or bad of itself; it is useful or not useful for a particular purpose.

If your goal is to judge the ideological impact of books, it might make good sense to classify them as liberal versus conservative or atheist versus Christian versus Hindu. If your goal is to allocate space to store books in a warehouse, you probably want to classify them by size and weight and you couldn't care less about the words themselves.

For purposes of selling, its common to classify books by genre because people DO routinely say, "I'd like to read a mystery story today" or "I'm looking for a romance." People rarely say, "I want a book by a left-handed author with blonde hair", so we don't normally classify books that way.

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Unfortunately I think what you're looking for is too subjective to be of mass applicability.

You suggest that books could be classified according to the "underlying purpose, moral, or message." That's ridiculously vague and wide open to interpretation.

Every reader is going to have a different sense of what a novel's moral or message might be. The author has one moral in mind, and most of the readers will see another. A message which was clear and unambiguously positive in 1850 will be anything from quaint to abhorrent in 2013. A book with an evangelical Christian message will be uplifting to one audience and revolting to another. Someone from Texas will read it differently than someone from Turkey. If any given person reads a book at age 14, that same exact person isn't necessarily going to see the book the same way at 34. And so on.

You might try looking up specialized reviewers or bloggers depending on what your own niche is (feminist leanings, Christianity, no animals were harmed), but trying to classify books according to what they mean is something best left to a Philosophy class.

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