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!