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

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.

Since the first days of the web, we’ve celebrated tools that let us alter the things we see according to our specifications. When I’m on expensive, metered mobile data, I turn off images. My increasing discomfiture with online tracking prompted me to install an ad-blocker. I used to use a plug-in that warned me whenever I was reading a site owned by Rupert Murdoch. I dote on this plugin that changes linkbait headlines into milder versions, so “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment” and “One Weird Trick” becomes “One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit”.

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.

It’s precisely because I disagree with Clean Reader’s users that I have no business prohibiting them from choosing how they read the copies of my books that they lawfully acquire with equipment they choose. It’s easy to be a free speech advocate when you agree with the speaker. Unless you support speech you find objectionable, you don’t support free speech at all.

Make no mistake, this is a free speech issue. The right to free expression includes the right to decide whom you listen to, and how. Free speech is not compelled listening.

The writer has no right to dictate how the reader must read. I can’t celebrate a parent’s inspired, genderswitched Bilbo Baggins or Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles novels – which started life as an extended piss-take of the Wombles – without defending the rights of readers whose changes I disagree with.

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.

Others say that Clean Reader makes derivative works by allowing readers to decide how they read. If this is so, then every ad blocker does the same. I once worked in a bookstore that sold markers. If I sold you a book and a marker and told you to line out the first paragraph on page 251 if you wanted to avoid a piece of terrible writing, I wouldn’t be the one preparing the derivative work – you would. It would make me a bad bookseller, not a copyright infringer or a censor.

I want a future where readers get to decide how they read. I want to be able to make and share annotations to climate-denial bestsellers – even if that means deniers can mark up Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and share their notes. I want to be able to turn Oxford commas off and on. I want to be able to change the font, block the ads, and swap cliched passages for humorous alternatives. I want Bechdelware that let me choose to genderswap the characters. I want sentiment analysis that tries to sync a music playlist with the words I read.

I want people to be able to do stupid things with their computers. Because more than anything, I want computer users to have the final say about what their computers do.

That includes kids, by the way. It’s one thing for an adult to use Clean Reader to make her reading experience accord with her preferences. The same principle that says she should be allowed to dictate her computer’s behaviour means her kids should be able to decide for themselves how sweary the books they read are.

Every writer whose Clean Reader denunciations I’ve read disagrees with Clean Reader because they perceive, correctly, that Clean Reader was created by and for social conservatives who practice linguistic bigotry. To these writers, I say: “Who will stand up for the tool that changes text in a way you like, and that bigots hate?” If you’re worried about the slippery slope of readers being able to “censor” their own books, what about the slippery slope of copyright becoming a tool to stymie the changes you agree with?