Joanne Harris, author of Creative Freedom Award winner novel "Chocolat," thinks that brainwashing is rampant in books, particularly the ones those gender-packaged claiming that titles with rockets are for boys and the ones with cupcakes are for girls. She admits that this indoctrination is so subtle and will appear to parents as no more than "a harmless marketing strategy," but in an essay for The Author, she laid out reasons why this really is "harmful in so many ways."

The author herself has experienced such as she was instructed by her publisher to change the cover for "Gentlemen and Players," a book of hers she described as a "rather masculine thriller set in an all-boys' school," as the publisher was afraid that the lack of pink from the design  will shoo away possible female readers.

Harris also recalled the time she walked into a supermarket, where she was welcomed by a shelf stocked with what were called Brilliant Colouring Book for Boys that are colored blue and festooned with the likes of rocket ships, Vikings, pirates and kites while the pink ones named Beautiful Colouring Book for Girls were plastered with images of princesses, puppies, flowers and cupcakes.

Describing this as a "subliminal indiscrimination" and out-and-out stereotyping, Harris believes that children, "highly impressionable" as they are, will easily adapt the ideas and "prejudices" presented to them by this practice early on and will likely shape their ideals growing up. Harris says that gender packaging on books is "really a form of brainwashing, repeating the false message to a new generation that boys must be clever, brave and strong, while girls should aspire to be decorative."

The author calls for publishers to stop dividing books and determining which ones are "for boys" and which reads are "for girls." This is why she sang praises for Let Books Be Books, an organization of parents who advocate for the elimination of gender labels in books. The group has already swayed nine publishers to join the advocacy but many more remain unabashed.

"Promoting books for boys is like promoting stereotypes about boys -- if you say a book for boys is one about football, what about the boys who don't like football? These books don't just exclude girls, they could also exclude boys," campaigner Tricia Lowther told The Guardian, agreeing with Harris about how dangerous this labelling can be when it follow kids into adulthood.

Harris admits that this "brainwashing" isn't unique to children's books. She says it happens quite as often in adult fiction as well, starting with the pink-colored covers of romance books that tend to exclude men and the wartime books written by men and women that are jacketed differently in the sense that the former's look masculine with battlefields and warriors as cover while the latter's are made to appear feminine with flowers and girls.