‘Apple rejects a new e-book reader because it can download the Kama Sutra’
“A new reader called Eucalyptus was rejected due to ‘offensive content’ because it could download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg.” – TeleBlog reader.
For more details: Wired, Ars Technica, Daring Fireball, Slashdot and MacNN.
Obvious question: What about Stanza, BookShelf, BookZ and other apps that can already display evil books from Gutenberg and elsewhere? And along with Amazon’s search engine problems, isn’t this more evidence of the risk of linking content to hardware or software without alternatives being available? The Kama Suta is oh so tame compared to cable TV fare.
Thought from TechCrunch: Could the reviewers be overworked?
A few sources of Kama Sutra: Gutenberg, Feedbooks (where I found the above image), Blue Grass Publishing / Fictionwise.
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:51 am
Just like that Twitter app whose update was blocked because some users said the F-word, and the Nine Inch Nails app that was blocked for an explicit song that, it later turned out, wasn’t even accessible via the upgrade.
Are Apple’s approval crew indulging in controlled substances? For crying out loud.
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Who gets to decide what is offensive content? What if I wanted to reject religious texts like the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, or the Book or Mormon? Imagine the howls of extrication if the scripture were rejected for offensive content.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
The very same book can also be viewed on the built-in web browser inside the iPhone. Quite staggeringly stupid. Apparently all these arguments have been used by the Eucalyptus developers to the iPhone Board of Censors, all to no avail.
Here we have the finest reason to loathe all monopolies when it comes to books, information, and the written word.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I vaguely recall that David Rothman once said that school children used TeleRead to perform research, and hence articles and comments at TeleRead should be circumspect regarding traditional areas of taboo. For example, words like “fuck” were to be avoided or minimized. But based on the illustration accompanying this article my memory is faulty, or the policy has changed. Is there any policy now?
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I’m sure that school children would love the illustration with this article. Kids comb libraries for that sort of stuff. Don’t worry about it.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Thanks for your thoughts, Sept and Tracy. The kids will survive. Tracy’s library comparison is apt—it isn’t as if libraries here in the States are porn centers, but they do carry books like Kuma Sutra as part of larger general collections. It is art, not sleaze. Beyond that, although school kids use TeleRead for research, we also need to consider that the typical readers are much older and will be interested in censorship controversies. Our goal here is to be more commonsensical than the Apple App store.
As for libraries outside the States, I suspect that American ones are between those in Scandinavia and those in, say, Moslem countries. In fact, I’m glad we’re having this discussion. What to do about global libraries deemed offensive to certain societies? How much filtering, if any? No easy answers here.
Thanks,
David
May 24th, 2009 at 11:25 am
FYI, Eucalyptus is now available on the ITMS.
The developer just provided the brief announcement
http://blog.th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/
It will be interesting to see if they provide the further correspondence with Apple
May 24th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Many thanks for the link, Jim. And on another topic, I’d love for you or colleagues at Adobe to offer thoughts on my post about Adobe Digital Editions. I’m hoping ADE will succeed, but I think a major redesign is called for. Any reactions to that should go in the comment area associated with the ADE post. Or I can post Adobe comments to the main part of the blog. I think the feedback from me and other TeleBlog regulars will benefit Adobe and other vendors. As you can see from my thoughts about the (apparent) Adobe module in the Sony eBook Library, I think Adobe is doing some things very well. I’d like to see the same approach show up in ADE.
Thanks,
David
July 2nd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
It will be interesting to see if they provide the further correspondence with Apple