An e-mail from Clean Reader
After my blog post the other day, I got this e-mail from the official Clean Reader site. Rather than give out e-mail addresses and identities, I’m copying and posting it here, along with my reply.
Dear Joanne,
I wanted to reach out to you given your recent comments regarding Clean Reader. I want to reassure you we are not selling edited copies of your books. The books we offer are word-for-word the exact same as how you wrote them. And if it wasn’t clear, our unique “Clean Reader” function can be turned OFF with the click of a button if the reader decides they don’t want/need any of the words hidden.
Our initial release of this app has stirred up WAY more emotion than we ever anticipated. We are certainly not interested in engaging in a battle with authors. We respect your talents and rights to write whatever you feel compelled to write. You should use whichever words you feel are best suited for the character, situation, naration, etc. Our hope is to simply provide a tool for some people to use who love great books but are equally opposed to reading profanity. Many of the people who we’ve heard from that are using Clean Reader say they’re willing to miss out on a little bit of context in order to avoid reading some profanity. Ideally our app will open the door to more readers/customers to consume a more diverse selection of books.
If you have any constructive ideas of changes you’d reccomend to our app that would make it less offensive to you as an author please feel free to send them to me and we’ll certainly consider working them into a future release of the app.
Highest regards,
J…..
Dear J….
Thank you for your mail.I appreciate your attempt to involve authors in the debate, and wish I could be more conciliatory. However, my objections to Clean Reader go far beyond whether or not my work is being edited, or my copyright infringed.If you have read my blog post, you’ll see that my problems with this app are threefold.
1. Artistic: Writers of fiction choose their words (including what you refer to as profanities) very carefully. We generally don’t write “for context”, but to create an effect. By allowing words to be replaced or blanked out, this effect is reduced to a clumsy translation, or negated completely. To enable a writer’s work to be modified without permission, then for you claim that nothing much has been altered, is to completely misunderstand the nature of fiction writing. Worse still, you are enabling us to be judged and misrepresented on the basis of words that your app has put into our mouths.
2. Moral. It’s clear from the list of words you consider “profane” that this app is designed to impose a Christian agenda on books. This is insulting to non-Christians. The pejorative use of the word “witch” as a substitute for “bitch” is offensive to pagans, and illustrates your religious bias.
3. Pedagogical. If, as you suggest, this app is partly designed for young readers, then I believe the toxic message it carries (that body parts are shameful and must not be mentioned by name; that sex is dirty and shameful) is likely to be extremely harmful to impressionable young people, and may result in serious psychological damage, with all the social consequences that may entail.
These are my objections to Clean Reader. And however much I respect your desire to reach out to me, I don’t believe there’s anything you can do to improve the situation, short of taking your app off the market altogether, and allowing the public to choose for itself how to deal with authors’ choice of vocabulary.
Sincerely,
Joanne Harris
