In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new app in the book world that is stirring up quite a bit of controversy. It’s called Clean Reader and it basically goes through an ebook and filters out the profanity, with settings for “clean,” “cleaner,” and “squeaky clean.” It was designed by the parents of a teenager who expressed dismay at finding profanity in an otherwise clean book.
The response from authors has been vociferous. Chuck Wendig (WARNING: Chuck uses so much profanity, he probably deserves a Clean Reader filter setting of his own) predictably came down hard against it, as well as Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat. Over on KBoards, there’s an ongoing thread of indie authors slamming it as a denial of artistic expression, as a copyright violation, as malicious censorship—basically, the whole gamut. Interestingly, though, Cory Doctorow came out in defense of it.
Personally, this app reminds me a lot of CleanFlicks, a movie rental place here in Utah that edited out objectionable content such as sex, violence, and profanity. I watched the edited version of Zombieland while I was in college, and while I enjoyed it, it was… short. CleanFlicks did a lot of business, right up until the US Supreme Court shut it down.
While I can see why some writers would hate this app, I actually sympathize more with the readers. Living in Utah, I know a lot of people (some of them in my own family—hi Kate!) who are exactly the kind of people for whom Clean Reader was made. And much like Cory Doctorow, I think that their right to control their own reading experience trumps the writer’s right to freedom of expression.
The act of reading is fundamentally a collaborative experience. Until someone opens a book and reads it, that book is just symbols on a page, or bytes of data on a storage device. Meaning is only generated through the act of reading—in a very real sense, the story is created by the reader just as much as by the writer. As much as we writers like to think of ourselves as free to write whatever we want, without readers, that freedom counts for very little. And that’s exactly the way it should be.
A lot of writers are making fun of Clean Reader on the basis that the very premise is flawed—that filtering out profanity won’t do anything to clean a fundamentally dirty story. But while that’s true of some books, I do think there’s a middle ground where the app can give some value.
For example, my first novel Genesis Earth is a mostly clean science fiction adventure romance with a few tense moments where the characters use a mild level of profanity. As a writer, it didn’t feel right to have my characters say “darn” instead of “damn,” or “crap” instead of “shit.” Sanitizing the book on that level would have kicked most readers right out of the story. But if a reader who is sensitive to that use of language wants to read a filtered version of Genesis Earth, the story is not going to be fundamentally changed by filtering out those words.
Probably the biggest objection to Clean Reader is that it enforces or promotes a censorship regime that many writers find objectionable. Of course, most of the people who make that argument probably have no idea what “censorship” really entails, just like the people who throw out accusations like “socialist,” “sexist,” “racist,” etc. But putting that can of worms aside, is it right for people to use apps like this—say, parents of young children—to control what other people read?
I am a diehard libertarian, but I actually think that beneath a certain age, parents do have a right to censorship. As legal guardians of their children, parents have a right and a responsibility to raise them as they see fit. If you don’t allow parents to censor what their children are exposed to, then you’re basically saying that society as a whole should raise them, or (God forbid!) the government. I think that’s a horrible idea. Children should be raised by the people who are closest to them, and responsible parents/guardians should be free to raise their children as they (and only they) see fit.
So I’m actually rather supportive of the Clean Reader app. I personally wouldn’t use it, either for myself or for my children, but if other readers do then I have no objection to that. Writers should be free to write whatever they want, and readers should be free to read whatever they want, however they want to read it.
