So What Do You Think Of This?

Allow Clean Reader to swap 'bad' words in books – it's a matter of free speech

|Cory Doctorow
Monday 30 March 2015 14.38 BST |

"An ebook app called Clean Reader has writers up in arms over its blacklist of “profanity”. While you read your ebooks, it looks for hot-words and swaps them with milder versions like “fiddlesticks”. This is a stupid, offensive app, but it’s emblematic of the best the electronic age has to offer..."

"Writers object to Clean Reader because the people who made it have stupid ideas about novels. Their crude search/replace will undoubtedly do violence to fiction and the readers who use it are making bad decisions. But it’s their decision to make..."

"Clean Readers’s opponents have stated that the company is illegally selling altered texts. This is not the case. Clean Reader has a license to sell ebooks – they operate a storefront backed by a major ebook retailer’s OEM platform – and the books that they sell are unaltered. By default, their customers see the verbatim, author-approved text. The reader, not the company, makes the decision to engage the filter, knowing what effect it will have on the text. .."

|► Click Here For Full Story|

I don't know about you, but aren't we getting a little too stupid? I don't mean that in a degrading way. I mean it as in a, why must we have to censor everything? It's getting out of hand. Changing "bad word(s)" in a story, can take something that is supposed to be serious and make into a joke.

Books should have some realism, and come of it, everyone swears, if they tell you they don't, they're lying.

How smart is this app? Can it tell in what context the word is being use? Like bitch, sure it's use as an insult, but by definition it also means, female dog. I have read a few time period books that do use the word as it was originally intended. So how would the app change that? The same goes for bastard, if you look it up, it means, a person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child.

In my opinion these bad words are only bad because we, over time, have made it that way.

I don't find these words offensive. How can I be offended if someone is basically calling me a female dog? -Dogs are cute, so in a sense I'm being called cute-

In the written word, these words aren’t directed at the reader, but helps with the building a characters personality. Having your strong lead suddenly shout fiddlesticks! Like a 10 year old, well, would you take that seriously?

This is my opinion of this weird app. I will never use it, it's a slap in the face to author's who spend months, years, writing a book, getting it just the why they want, only for some app, to fix, their use of inappropriate words. Because no matter how this app gets spun to please the masses, this’s not some fluffy tool to ease our delicate minds, no, it’s a new way to censor and to fix.

Tell me what you think in the comments.

Cheers

-Emily

Cheers

-Emily