Category Archives: debate

This Content Is Clean!

movie_rating_labels_by_fairyfindings-d45tuzt So there’s this bonfire among the writing community blogosphere involving an app called Clean Reader. This is from its blog:

Clean Reader prevents swear words in books from being displayed on your screen. You decide how clean your books should appear and Clean Reader does the rest.

This is, as one of my friends pointed out, CleanFlicks for books. The first blog post I saw came from one of my favorite firebrands, Chuck Wendig. His blog post, which is gloriously “unclean”, has some legitimate points. If they are a) making changes to ebooks and reselling them without the consent of the publisher or b) selling books that are no longer available then this isn’t legal as far as I can tell.

If, as their copy says, they are filtering books without making changes to them, then as stupid as I think this idea is, I don’t see the problem. When a television channel airs an edited copy of a movie, no one screams bloody murder. They have permission and authorial intent be “darned”, they will make sure that your family doesn’t hear any naughty words or see any naughty bits.

I do plan downloading and trying it out. I’m curious to see what the whole deal is. I don’t plan on using it outside of curiosity, since I believe that an author’s work should be consumed unchanged. If words or images offend you, then it’s on you to see that you don’t consume those things (or that you get offended and then perhaps grow as a person).

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