A Christian couple from Idaho have stopped selling ebooks through their app Clean Reader (www.cleanreaderapp.com), which censors swear words, following complaints from authors.
Jared and Kirsten Maughan built the free app, available for Android and iOS, after their teenage daughter objected to swear words in a book she was reading at school.
The app suggests alternatives to swear words, religious and sexual terms, and certain body parts. For example, the f-word becomes ‘freak’, ‘penis’ becomes ‘groin’, ‘vagina’ becomes ‘bottom’, ‘sexy’ becomes ‘lovely’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ becomes ‘gee’.
It has three settings: ‘Clean’, ‘Cleaner’ and ‘Squeaky Clean’. The last of these extends censorship to include “some hurtful racial terms”.
But following a backlash from authors, the couple said that the app will no longer sell ebooks because “many authors do not…
