Censoring Ebooks: The Clean Reader Brouhaha...

Maybe I missed it, but does this app also clean offensive sexual relationships as well? I can't imagine someone offended by effing and bleeding all over the place, not being offended by improper (to their way of thinking) sexual couplings.

How clean is your book now that all the profanity is gone, but Jerry and Tom (or Barbara and Margo) are at it like rabbits? I wonder what Samuel Delany would say to this? Something to chew on, eh?
 
It's totally simple automated Search and replace with <unwanted><replacement>
It has a 100+ entries but is updated when they feel like it.
I can't find the contents of the list, that appears to be "secret", which is not cricket.
Nor can the user change it.
Many words may map to one word

Something like

<any named lower body private bit> -> bottom
<diety> -> goodness
bitch -> witch
damn - dang

It's a pretty dumb automatic search & replace, with two levels of sensitivity. THEY decide what the bad word -> replacement word is, users can't change that, as far as I can see, only use a web form to suggest more words they want changed.

It's pointless really.
 
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I think from what I saw and read, it's whole words that are delimited.
The software company that did it for them (they only maintain database and marketing, it's a 3rd party off the shelf app modified by the company for them) aren't idiots, unlike some ISP's web filters
 
The eBook catalogue is provided by Page Foundry - http://www.pagefoundry.com/


In Europe an author could attempt to argue this app breaches their 'Moral rights'.

Quote from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

Moral rights
The preserving of the integrity of the work bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation. Anything else that may detract from the artist's relationship with the work even after it leaves the artist's possession.

In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even waive their moral rights.

Moral rights have had a less robust tradition in the United States. The exclusive rights tradition in the United States is inconsistent with the notion of moral rights....
 
To me the main problem with this is that in the future the "clean up" will be more sophisticated. Subtly change the tone of the book. Make rebellious behavior seem foolish, wrong. The government is the protagonist and we should all do what they tell us.

If we don't have a bound original version how do we know what has been changed? I can see this happening with books out of copyright as there is no one to defend against changes.
 
I do indeed**.

As for Latin: that's the language that sounds as if it confuses you and the V-sign. Very unfriendly. :rolleyes:


** - I've been deeply disappointed ever since I saw that film: when I went to the "Treasury" at Petra, the guide didn't show us the entrance to the sanctuary of the Holy Grail. :(;) (Even so, Petra is an amazing place.)
 
findagrave.jpg

I drive past Thomas Bowdler's old house (now a rather run down multiple occupancy university student let) every day, and I work close to the cemetery where he is buried, so that makes me especially qualified to pontificate on this subject.

The dubious legality, and the intellectual property rights issues of the Clean Reader thing should not be seen as variable depending on one's views on profanity or obscenity in literature, and it is also not dependent on artistic outrage at the very idea. The legal aspects of this piece of software are quite separate from the protection of minors or sensitive individuals from offending material.

I am curious how it will deal with the Oxford English Dictionary. Back in the old days of the 1970s, we used to get the giggles looking up rude words in the dictionary in the school library.

My view is that Clean Reader sort of misses the point of the exercise anyway, a bit like violent TV or film, full of guns, death and explosions, which feels the need to censor the odd bit of nipplage. The subversive or disturbing elements of fiction are much deeper than some rude words, as others have already pointed out. Profanity for its own sake has little merit, but used well it can be effective and sometimes very funny.

Bowdler (who took the rude bits out of Shakespeare, and the orgies out of Gibbons) is now regarded by most as an amusing historical curiosity, an example of the pre-Victorian moral neuroticism of some sectors of British society at the time (not mirrored by a large portion of the contemporary London cultural establishment.) And this is the point: the Clean Reader is a Cultural Phenomenon. It is probably irrelevant to the views much of North America, and from the European side of the pond it will be likely be regarded in much the same way as Mr Bowdler: not relevant for the majority to juvenile or adult cultural life in Europe in the early 21st century, and just another slightly baffling divergence of US culture from that of much of Western Europe, up there with Hershey bars.
 
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Hershey bars
What Americans eat till offered real Chocolate. Baffled. The local shop here in rural Limerick, Ireland is now selling large range of Hershey bars. We have a Cadbury factory and all the lovely Irish and German chocolate.
Now that Kraft have changed the Cadbury Creme egg, we will now get 57 varieties! Oddly Hershey made the different version of Cadbury creme egg anyway for USA, they never had the real one.*

Cadbury - Heinz - Kraft may make sense for shareholders but for British and Irish Consumers?

Sorry for off topic. But I've eaten Hershey bars.

(*I've never actually liked creme eggs much. Fry's chocolate creme with the thick dark chocolate was more my sweet)
 
Although my writting has alot to be desired, I take pride that there is not a single "profanity" or "sexually explicit" word in my work. Until the software is smart enough to pull out entire sentences for the context, I'm not worried.
 
You make some good points and the analogy holds to a degree. But I can't remember ever reading a book where the profanity was the central point of the story. The closest I can come to that would be "On Golden Pond," where the unabated profanity by the ex-professor was his way of expressing his anger.* Replacing "Jesus" with "Satan" would amount to changing the central point of the story much as would the replacing ISIS with USA.

Again, that's kind of the point. Replacing Jesus with Satan would very much alter the story and we don't know if that's what they're doing because they won't tell. I don't like the idea of ANY company with an explicit agenda censoring works without the author's permission and without having to tell anyone what their procedures are. If their edits are so innocuous and just touch on bad language, why are they so secretive about how they're editing things?

To use a less extreme example... what about the use of the n-word in Huck Finn? It can be construed as a bad word, but I would argue that it is somewhat necessary in the book to show the depths of southern hatred and the reality of being a second class citizen. A censor could very easily say editing out that language to not offend people is good, while Twain might roll in his grave at the way his work has been redacted so as not to offend anyone's delicate sensibilities, which is in many ways a NECESSARY effect for the book to produce in order to accomplish what Twain set out to do.
 
I don't think that's true to be honest. I've known quite a few of these unicorns over the years and my children are related to a number of them. They are mostly normal people and that's why they want to read the books without compromising what they believe.

No offense, but I sort of feel like my reaction to this is... TOO FREAKING BAD! Maybe part of the reason I or another author wrote a book was to challenge beliefs or make people think about and question theirs. You don't get to live your life wrapped in a nice protective bubble that presents the entire world in a way that will never offend you, and you don't get to read my book that way either. You can read my book the way we all have to live our lives, which means sometimes it's going to have things that are dirty or unpleasant or don't fit nicely into the little boxes we've made our worldview. If reading my book the way I wrote it compromises someone's beliefs, then maybe they shouldn't be reading my book at all and we can find a nice, safe, sterile book for them that never makes them think about their beliefs.
 
One possible upside of having one's novel "cleaned" is that one can then claim that one is a renouned writer, with the hope that this news will reverberate around the literary world.

:rolleyes:
 

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