On Friday I
mentioned the CNet editor who self-published his novel and then wrote a long column about doing so. Now it seems (courtesy
Galleycat) Apple won't allow his book to be sold as an e-book for the iPhone because of a single line in which "a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to '(love) me like you mean it,' just with a slightly more emphatic verb." The story goes on to speculate just how this phrase came to the attention of Apple, quoting a developer: "What would happen if I (a Romanian) would publish an e-book filled with Romanian obscenities? -- would Apple's staff need to learn Romanian... and read the entire ebook ... to make sure this doesn't happen?"
But the part of the story that caught my attention was lower down, in a section recounting Apple's struggle to keep iPhone apps SFW:
Apple's definition of "objectionable" has been questioned before. After initially balking, Apple finally relented to the extremely influential fart joke lobby last week and permitted applications such as Pull My Finger and iFart Mobile (ranked 3rd and 10th, respectively, among paid App Store applications at the moment) under what was described as a "Mature" section.
Really? Sounds like apps with names like that should be in an "Immature" section.
technorati: books, Apple, censorship
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