Clean Reader Groining with Books Stops – For Now

Karin Kallmaker Business of Books

Meme button I'm a writer. What's your superpower?

Undoubtedly, the creators of Clean Reader did not anticipate the crapstorm their app would rain down on them. It’s clear that their shopping cart marketplace, Inktera, didn’t. Inktera – which had been providing customer support to the authors and publishers demanding their products not be discoverable by the app – just pulled their marketplace from the app. So Clean Reader is an app with no products to monetize.

For now. Constant vigilance being the price of liberty, etc. How long before it’s back, this time working on any DRM-free ebook?

It’s possible Inktera got some legal advice that Clean Reader’s creators didn’t. It has further occurred to me that if this were legal and advisable a certain large player in the ebook market would already have the feature and possibly be charging a monthly fee to deploy it. But they don’t. Maybe other people thought of it first and ran it past legal.

It seems to me that Clean Reader was and is still wide open for nuisance lawsuits. “I downloaded your app and my kid read XYZ anyway and that’s profanity and now has nightmares and won’t go to college and…!”

Meanwhile, kudos to the authors like Joanne Harris and Chuck Wendig who led the charge. Special nod to Wendig, who made me snort iced coffee through my nose – twice! Here’s Wendig’s epic one-liners post-Clean Reader’s “scrubbing.”