Swear Words in e-Books

Once you buy a (physical) book, it’s yours not only to read but also to edit (e.g. you are free to underline or strike out parts or add your own comments). The Kindle allows you to do the same with e-books (except that you can’t strike out anything).

An app called Clean Reader swaps out swear words from your e-books (‘breast’ might become ‘chest’ and so on). Charlie Stross feels this goes too far:
“(As an author, he) deeply resents the idea of his books being mutilated to fit the prejudices of a curious reader's blue-nosed and over-protective parents.”

Cory Doctorow argues that one has the right to like or dislike such an app, but one cannot ask that it be banned for mangling what the author wrote. After all, even if you banned such an app, Doctorow asks whether readers won’t find equivalent info anyway? He cites this example:
“Imagine a website ("ebooktriggerw1arnings.com") that indexed all the pages you should skip if you have experienced trauma and want to ensure that you don't read rape scenes. There's no coherent doctrine of moral rights that would prohibit readers from discussing, indexing, and sharing this sort of annotation, even if it leads the readers to miss out on whole passages when they read the book.”
True, but checking out such sites and skipping the parts they point out would take quite a lot of effort. Whereas the app would do it with zero effort.

Then again, Stross counter-argues that Doctorow doesn’t get the real problem with the app:
“I think he's missing the distinction between censorship and editing—that what's happening here is not straightforward "you can't read that" blocking, but actual substitution of someone else's words for my own, subtly or unsubtly corrupting and misrepresenting the author's words.”

Of course, every swear word in a book doesn’t make it offensive. Guess which book the PR for the Clean Reader cites as an example?
“There will be times when the app blocks a word that isn't being used as a profanity. Jesus Christ is another example. If a reader is reading the Bible with Clean Reader there will be quite a lot of words blocked; hell, damn, ass, Jesus, etc. The user will have to make a judgement call as to whether or not to use the "Clean Reader" feature with each book. If it's a religious book they may just opt to turn the feature off.”
Funny how the Bible is the example for a book where a swear word isn’t necessarily offensive!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more