Before we go any further, please note that the title above is snark. And below? There will be more snark.
oh and there will be profanity, lots of it, i just feel I better put that up front, above the fold, so we're all on the same page.
K?
Okay. Let's dance.
In Idaho there was a little girl and the little girl had library time at school. They read a book that the girl liked but it had a swear in it and that made the little girl sad. She told her mom and dad and they said "Well honey, there's an app out there that can fix all of that, since you liked the book and all."
There wasn't.
So they made one.
Called CleanReader (and no, I won't bloody link to it), it does exactly what it says on the tin. You download the app. Then you can download (for a fee) books from an ebook distributor. It then, if there are swear words, censors the book for you. The user is free to decide the level of censorship. If they are such delicate poppies that they can't handle a single swear, at all, it'll will replace the offending word with one more palatable. No piss, shit, cum, dick, pussy, fuck, damn for you!
AND
no bitch for you, no Jesus Christ for you, no Goddamn for you and other words that AREN'T curses. Vagina is changed to bottom. clitoris is changed to bottom. penis is changed to groin. A sentence that reads "he placed his throbbing and turgid penis into her quivering, waiting vagina" (YES, I KNOW THIS SENTENCE IS THE WORST SENTENCE EVER, EVER CONSTRUCTED) will be changed to "he placed his throbbing and turgid groin into her quivering, waiting bottom."
Now this is nothing new under the sun. They did this to Shakespeare back in the day, because let's face it, Shakespeare is pretty goddamn ratchet. In Titus Andronicus for example, the horrifying and graphic rape of a major character notwithstanding, a mother is made to eat her own fucking children. Gotdamb!
That's Shakespeare.
But Thomas Bowdler thought the women and children of his day couldn't handle the raw horror of that play, and the bawdiness of other plays (I mean half of them are basically sex follies that basically are the same as the silly ass Rom-Coms that Hollywood shits out on a weekly basis) so he changed Shakespeare's words and in some cases, plays. You know, for the children.
But in our time, you can't take someone else's book, edit the whole fuck out of it, and then resell it as that person's own work (even though, it kinda seems like the books are indeed altered at the storefront they use) because that's illegal and you'll get fucking sued. It's why E.L. James had to "rewrite" her twilight fanfic. You cannot sell your fanfic and some writers will come after you if you write it in the first place. JK Rowling's okay with fanfic (just don't sell it). The writers of the Liaden universe are not (don't write it AT ALL). That's the thing; it's THEIR property.
So these people made an app. A ridiculous shitfuck of an app.
Writers are NOT fucking happy not one goddamn bit.
Chuck Wendig writes:
I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.
So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:
Fuck you, Clean Reader.
cups hand to mouth
Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.
fuckecho through the canyon of fucks
Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.
right on, chuck! I was cheering through the whole thing. He also writes:
Authors write the books they want to write.
And you can read them as they are written.
That’s it. Game over.
You want differently?
Go buy Mad Libs. They let you insert whatever fucking words you like.
at which point I came pretty close to orgasm.
and Joanne Harris writes:
First, what counts as “profanity”? Close inspection of the “acceptable alternatives” suggests a very strong Christian bias. Therefore, “Oh my God!” becomes “oh my goodness!” “Jesus Christ” becomes “geez” and so on. “Bitch” becomes “witch” (bad news for modern pagans), and by now we’re already beginning to see some obvious problems emerging.
The fact is that these “acceptable alternatives” are all taken from modern American slang, and not only do some of them make no sense in the context of English literature, they are likely to be far more intrusive (and potentially, more offensive) than the word they are meant to replace.
Body parts have often been the target for censorship, and Clean Reader seems, not only determined to remove all mention of them from your reading experience, but also to make it as difficult as possible to distinguish one from the other. Therefore, “vagina”, “anus”, “buttocks” and “clitoris” all become “bottom”, which seems to me not only anatomically incorrect, but also pointlessly repetitive (as well as potentially dangerous).
(the makers of the app had the audacity to paint themselves as victims to Ms. Harris. You can read that shit--and Joanne Harris's awesome reply,
here)
Jennifer Porter, a romance writer, had these observations with this piece of digital shit app:
I found reading books with redacted words to be extremely choppy and uncomfortable. In most cases (unless it was in dialogue), it is not easy to figure out what the sentence is supposed to mean. This makes it often a requirement for readers to click on the dot and see the suggested word. And while some word suggestions do not change the meaning of the sentence, some change it entirely - with almost hilarious results. But seriously, the word suggestions are vital to the story. I mostly joke here, but this is seriously wrong on many levels.
The most egregious example of this is the fact that all words for female genitalia (vagina and pussy) are replaced with bottom. Take the following:
“Where shall I [freak] you, Victoria? Where do you want my [groin]?”
“I want it in . . . my [bottom].” from Jackie Ashenden’s Living in Secret
Apparently, all sex (which of course is a bad word itself) is actually anal sex (or bottom love) as vaginas are entirely erased by the Clean Reader app. I am willing to be that this wasn’t intentional but it makes a very profound and dismissive statement about female sexuality.
And Charlie Stross
had this to say:
Mangling an author's text is a clear violation of the author's Moral rights, an element of copyright which is very weak in the United States and very strong elsewhere (primarily in civil law jurisdictions). (The moral right is the right of an author to be identified as the creator of a work, and for the work represented as their creation to be unaltered by other hands, so that the relationship between creator and created work is clear.) Mangling an author's text may be legal or illegal in the USA, depending on whether it occurs before or after sale. After all, I can't stop you buying one of my books and editing it with a sharpie: it's a physical object and according to the first sale doctrine, it's yours to do with as you wish. I may be able to legally stop you modifying an ebook, though: ebooks are not sold but a limited license to download and use them is granted in exchange for money—a fine legal distinction that was borrowed from the software business's tame sharks—and that limited license may permit or deny such usage.
Clean Reader claim to get around this by (a) being a licensed distributor (they provide the app and sell books for it sourced from PageFoundry, a distributor who back-end onto various publishers), and (b) the censorship is performed on the reader device by the reader app, once the book has been purchased and downloaded. There's a bunch of case law around whether or not it's legal to do this to movie rentals or downloads, or legal to skip advertisements in recorded programming on your TiVo—it gets murky fast. But let's suppose they're right and what they're doing ("protect the children! At any cost! From naughty words like 'breast' and 'fuck'!") is legal.
I highly recommend clicking through and reading all of those reactions.
Oh and yes, I know Cory Doctorow is like "fuck your censorship but i'll fight for your right to censor people" and you know, he's entitled to his opinion like these lame ass prudefucks from Idaho are entitled to their dumbass app. It's just that they're wrong.
Let's unpack this. These people in Idaho, from the nature of their app, are likely some kind of Christian, perhaps Mormon, perhaps evangelical. I've seen what's offered for that market, what's directed toward that market. I'm almost convinced the evangelical film market outside of Burnett and Downey (and honestly, their stuff is overwrought hackneyed crap too, it's just produced better cause them heauxs rich as fuck) is awful on purpose, because everyone outside of the club makes fun of their books and movies and then they get to whine they're persecuted. This app tells me they low-key are acknowledging what's directed toward their consumer bracket is shit and they don't like it.
And then there's the assumption (it's on their website's FAQ) that people who use profanity in their writing can't write. Or people who use profanity can't use the English language correctly and with quality. That's bullshit, of course. I resent the idea that profanity is lower-class (how elitist). And you know fucking what? I've read evangelical fiction. No profanity, and I've shit out more interesting and well-developed things. Their written genre fic (outside of the Bible, but there are some truly awful modern translations out there designed to meet and subvert the politics of our day and that too is gross and a bit frightening, but a different subject) is just universally terrible. Quality? Fuck no, you won't find it there.
When I, or when any author writes, even those terribad 'vangie genrefic writers, they choose their words with care, be they random scripture references or curses that'd make a gay porn star at a sailor bar on orgy night blush. The words are there for a reason.
Now CleanReader claims what they're doing is perfectly legal and it just may be perfectly legal to change some author's words and present the shitfuck that results as that author's work but pretend you're not because your shitfuck of an app has "settings". I personally hope they get sued all the fuck out. And if that doesn't happen, it would not surprise me to see CleanReader's ebook distributor find itself losing more and more stock and then those people get stuck with the awful books they were trying to avoid in the first place. At which point, I will Nelson-laugh, because I'm petty like dat.