We've all got to the end of a novel and thought that it wasn't quite as good as it might have been. But one Idaho husband and wife believe they can improve on, well, a good chunk of the world's total literature.
The Clean Reader app was developed by Jared and Kirsten Maughan after their daughter came home from school apparently disappointed that a book she'd read had a few swearwords in it.
"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," they explain. "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."
The resulting search-and-replace app can be set to various different levels of prudishness, from clean to 'squeaky clean' - this latter even removing the word 'damn'. The offending word is blanked out, and the reader can click on the empty space to see a politer alternative.
'F**k' becomes 'freak', 'breast' becomes 'chest', and more or less any anatomical feature below the waist becomes 'bottom' - which I suspect will make many vanilla sex scenes appear altogether more adventurous than the authors intend.
Meanwhile, 'bitch' becomes 'witch', which, similarly, could leave some junior pet owners very confused.
Accordingly, some authors find the app more entertaining than threatening: British crime writer Ian Rankin, for example, who tweets: "People seem equivocal about the Clean Reader app, but I've just installed Dirty Reader and it has done wonders for the Miss Marple books."
However, Joanna Harris, the award-winning author of novels including Chocolat and The Gospel of Loki, is far more concerned.
Quite rightly, she sees Clean Reader as the thin end of a wedge that, at the other end, has Islamic State blowing up antiquities that it doesn't approve of.
"It starts with blanking out a few words. It goes on to drape table legs and stick fig leaves onto statues. It progresses to denouncing gay or Jewish artists as 'degenerate', she writes. "It ends with burning libraries and erasing whole civilizations from history."
And although you might argue that the app isn't compulsory, it's worth remembering that in the US books from The Diary of Anne Frank to The Catcher in the Rye have been banned by schools at one time or another; unfortunately, I could see this catching on.
There's probably nothing that can be done. Some people have suggested that there might be a copyright issue - but you are, after all, perfectly at liberty to deface a paper book with ludicrous substitutions if you wish, and I can't see that there's much difference here.
But I think what's most depressing about the app is the way that Mr and Mrs Maughan can't seem to see that they are, actually, teaching their daughter that fiction is valueless. As Joanne Harris points out, words aren't just about communicating the essentials of a plot. An author's choice of language - including swear words - is what gives characters their voice, communicates a mood and creates impact.
Mr and Mrs Maughan, in short, appear to lack any understanding of what fiction is, and what it is for. What a pair of... bottoms.
