Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again--By Apple | Hacker News Reader

Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again--By Apple

thebigmoney.com

I hope at least that Berry and Levitas are enjoying the free publicity.

This is the last line of the article. As usual, all articles written by journalists should be read from end to start, because if they're going to accidentally slip in something true and intelligent it always happens at the end. The beginning is where the linkbait, exaggeration, and strained narrative conventions live.

Complainers are part of the cost of running an editorial operation: When you reject someone, for any reason justified or not, they will tend to run to the loudest megaphone they can find and complain bitterly about how unfair it is, and about how the insular world of publishing is operating a sinister cartel with the goal of preventing their monumental work from making as much money as J. K. Rowling's.

In this particular case one imagines that these guys will get the app through on appeal. Some extremely rushed Apple reviewer saw an obvious violation of the letter of the rules and hit the reject button, secure in the knowledge that the details could be worked out during the inevitable appeal. It happens. But in the meantime the submitters are wisely milking the publicity machine for all it is worth. Journalists need something to talk about, and this sort of story slots right in. (Until these stories get boring, anyway. They're boring me already. Surely they will start boring others soon.)

And for the hundred thousandth time: Governments "ban" things, Apple and other publishers reject things. Apple is a publisher with a platform; publishers exert editorial control. Your unmade Hollywood screenplay and your rejected novel are rejected, not "banned". You do not have a First Amendment right to force me to promote or even endorse your work.

But I'm not surprised to see the article misuse these terms. It's the start of a piece of journalism, after all, and the first paragraph needs linkbait.

You write "Apple is a publisher with a platform". This is where things get interesting. In the past we had publishers, companies that were free to pick and choose the content that they wanted to invest in and distribute - and we had platform builders - companies who made things like printing presses and telephones. After you sell me a telephone switch or printing press, you don't get to dictate what gets printed on the press, the conversations that can take place on my phone or the kinds of programs that I watch on my tv. Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform and that's why they deserve heightened scrutiny. I don't have a problem with the Disney web site rejecting adult or political content - as you point out that's their business to make those choices - but I get really uneasy when the company building the hardware starts dictating what it can be used for.

Agreed. Apple of course can do what they want. But lots of us think its evil. At the least, its un-American. There's just no way Apple comes out of this looking like anything but a greedy corporation.

Uh. Where's the line, Joe? On the one hand, Highlights(r) for Children isn't can't have to publish this. On the other hand, any Creative Loafing alt-weekly should fall over itself to serialize it. And, it's not racy enough for Playboy.

Where along that spectrum would you dictate that Apple run its business?

Uh. Read my comment again. "Apple of course can do what they want". This thread is referring to the issue of both owning the channel and dictating the media content. Try to keep up.

You said Apple was "evil" and "un-American" for choosing not to publish something that contained nudity. Presumably, so is Highlights and Newsweek, then? Both of them own their channel too --- if you don't believe it, try to set up the fulfillment and distribution system Newsweek has.

Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform

This is hardware-scarcity thinking. My hypothesis is that our industry is so entrained to think like this that it's going to take a decade to settle in to our new universe. It's going to be like when the mainframe folks had to come to grips with the PC.

We are going to be awash in tablets within a year. Within five years we will be picking them out of the trash.

Platforms are a commodity now. I can buy a Windows laptop -- not a netbook, a 15" laptop -- for a few hundred bucks from my local Micro Center. Netbooks are even cheaper, of course. As for operating systems? The Linux revolution has arrived. Android has arrived and it is open-source. If you want to run your own platform you need to download Android and pay some Chinese manufacturing firm a few hundred bucks per unit to cough out a tablet or a generic smartphone and stick your nameplate on it. And if this isn't true now, it will be true in a year or two.

I have a Flip Mino video camera. Its processing power is surely greater than that of the laptop I owned ten years ago. I am about to literally take the thing apart for parts because its resale value is too small to care and my new iPhone is going to be a factor of five more useful.

When a hardware platform was a three thousand dollar investment we had to worry a lot about the manufacturer "dictating what it can be used for", because we couldn't afford more than one. The one we bought had to support everything we wanted to do, or we would be sad. When hardware platforms cost thirty dollars the calculus will change.

What Apple has figured out is that when hardware is a commodity, editing and publishing is the name of the game. You're no longer competing to sell more hardware independent of content, just as Conde Nast is not a paper company. Your asset is taste. Design. The ability to ship hardware-software-content combos that consistently work and consistently make the customer happy.

Sure hardware is a commodity and there is no scarcity there but the issue is not hardware it's access to the OS and there is an extremely limited number of mainstream consumer platforms. Right now the only options are proprietary systems run by two giant corporations. UNIX is currently a niche player and the Google Chrome OS is an unknown.

Furthermore, the increasing market share of the Apple platform obliges developers and publishers to develop custom products (e.g. Ulysses) for the iPhone/iPad. Except that now they'll have to self-censor or have Apple play the role of nanny.

I don't understand why Apple feels that this special user experience could be shattered by the glimpse of a human body part or an unsettling political viewpoint.

What an absolute shame. It's funny because I started reading Ulysses because it was available for a free e-reader iphone app. I had always been a bit wary of it (Pynchon drives me nuts and I often hear Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow mentioned together) but after reading a few chapters on the phone I picked up a copy and have been absolutely loving it.

Anyway, I realize that what was censored was a cartoon depicting the book . . . still, censoring something like Ulysses (of all things) is just short-sighted and ignorant.

Is nonsexual nudity really something we need to "protect" children from? All those shows is that people have genitalia.

I usually don't get all up in arms about multipage article crap, but this article is barely long enough for one print page, and then they split it at probably the worst possible point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com