Have you heard about the Clean Reader app? Its release has caused quite a stir in the reading and writing communities.

This free app, whose tagline is ‘Read books, not profanity’, allows you to blank out swear words in an ebook, so that they aren’t displayed on your ereader screen. You have a choice of three levels:

• Clean, which only blocks major swear words from display.
• Cleaner, which blocks everything that Clean blocks plus more.
• Squeaky Clean, which is the most restrictive setting and will block the most profanity from a book including some hurtful racial terms.

The developers made the book with children in mind; they explain on the website:

One day our oldest child came home from school and she was a little sad.  We asked her what was wrong and she said she had been reading a book during library time and it had a few swear words in it.  She really liked the book but not the swear words.  We told her that there was probably an app for this type of thing that would replace profanity with less offensive words and perhaps we should get her a tablet that she could use to read books with.  To our surprise there wasn’t an app like this.  The more we thought about this idea the more we wanted it to be a reality. 

But in fact, the app has widespread applications for adult readers who prefer not to read profanity in a book.

So why the big stir over an app with such admirable and noble intentions, aimed at giving the reader a new power? It comes down to how writers feel about their books being changed.

Some writers have argued that the app infringes copyright. However, lawyers have advised that this isn’t so because the app doesn’t make changes to the file containing the book, only how it is displayed on the screen.

Others argue that the app has dived into the world of censorship, and that it damages fiction. Writing for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow said,‘Their crude search/replace will undoubtedly do violence to fiction and the readers who use it are making bad decisions.’ But he goes on to say that ‘it’s their decision to make’: that ‘writers who are up in arms over the ebook app’s ‘profanity’ blacklist have no right to dictate how the reader should read their books’.

Certainly, a writer needs to care about the reader and his or her experience of the book. So it makes sense that if you choose to use profanity in your book, you also allow your reader to choose not to read those words. In a sense, if you accept the Clean Reader app then you broaden your market, because reader who would have given up on your book at the first profanity can now read on. But I wonder – will the reader keep reading?

If you’re offended by profanity, will you read past the blanks? Or will you be irritated that they exist? Even though you can’t read the actual swear words, you know that they exist, behind the blank. And if you’re someone who feels passionately enough to want to clean them out of your reading, perhaps you also feel passionately enough to want to avoid the works of authors who use profanity in the first place.

What do you think? Do you read books containing profanity? Do you give up on them? Would you use this app? I would love to hear your thoughts.