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", etc. Most bookstores and Web sites use essentially the same categories to classify their books and use a similar system for sorting movies.
Has anyone developed a comprehensive, alternative taxonomy to the common genre that brings a fresh perspective on how to quickly describe and sort a book? Is there another method used in other cultures in the world?
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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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