OMSK, February 4 (RAPSI) – A commission of the Pushkin Library in Omsk, Siberia, ruled that Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier must not be issued to minors, a library official told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

Library Deputy Director Oksana Moskovtseva said they were acting in accordance with the law On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development.

“New books are printed with age ratings marked on them. For books that were printed before 2012 we have a special commission of library staff that decides on their age suitability,” Moskovtseva said. “It’s difficult to make a decision because the phrasing of the law is not totally clear. We have decided against issuing Dreiser’s Financier to children because the Eksmo Publishers has rated the book 18+.”

The Pushkin Library contains 3.5 million books, says Moskovtseva, including 200,000 works of fiction, most of which have no age-suitability labels.

The law On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development came into force on September 1, 2012.

Under the law, information producers and providers – newspapers, magazines, television and radio broadcasts, movies, websites, etc. – must assign a rating to their content or provide a warning message, limiting the information to users over a certain age. Age ratings for children over six, 12, or 16 years are assigned depending on the degree of the texts or images’ potential psychological harm to children, especially if they contain adult language or scenes of violence, or may encourage the use of drugs, alcohol, or tobacco.