Censorship - How to Censor ebooks

[clintiepoo]

I don't really want to start a discussion about if you should do this - this is up to you. For me, I don't want to read cursing in an ebook. Everybody has their own tolerance level for content, but I've had to get rid of more than one physical book and ebooks alike because of bad language. So, I came up with a solution that works fairly well. This won't take a bad situation out of a book, but it will remove bad language.

Again, this isn't to debate censorship. If I want to scratch words out of my own physical book with a sharpie, that's my choice. I'm doing the same thing here digitally. Use this if you want - I'm sharing it because it might help somebody.

To use this, you have to extract the attached file into a directory where you can find it. Convert your ebook into whatever format you want. Before you hit convert, hit "Search and replace" on the left. Hit "load," and load this file.

This only finds exact matches of the words on the list. Sometimes authors will do things like "woooooow" with curse words. Other times, there are compound curse words and weird stuff that it can't catch either. For me, all the books I'm reading are at least pretty good - this just cleans some scattered language out of them. It won't make a horrible book good, but it will take out the language...

Another note: if you want to add your own word to the list (because this doesn't catch everything), put it in this format at the end of the list (the word you're filtering out is "word":
|\b(W|w)ord\b

-----------------------------

How I did it, if you're interested: I downloaded the mammoth word list, both censored and uncensored, from http://www.litscape.com/word_tools_m..._searches.html. I dumped the lists of 200,000+ words into excel and compared the lists. Uncensored word list - censored word list = "bad words". I had to scrub the list more because some of the terms didn't make sense to me (for example, the word "cracker" could be a racist term for a white person, but I don't want to pull every instance of the word "cracker" out of a book. This wasn't on the list, but that's the idea). After this, I had to do some regex work (again in excel) to catch upper and lower case words. This tool replaces the words with blanks. Calibre is funny with the search and replace, so I had to break the list into 5 different regular expressions to get it to work.

[meeera]

This list, which the "About" describes as "This list is truly the cesspool of the English language", is hilarious. Some of my favourite "cesspool" words:

Bootee
Bloody
Bastardize
Assize
Bohunk
Busty
Commie
Cumquat
Dick
Glans
Hadji
Hell
Hooch
Hussy
Hustler
Kaffir
Lesbos
Moke
Mung
Piker
Pule
Puss
Rigger
Rump
Snowballing
Snigger
Spunk
Tawdry
Tinkle
Wazoo
Damned
Jesus Christ
Asses

So so far we have eviscerated.... cookbooks, gardening books, travel books, books about animals, books about cars, children's fairy tales, books about Islam, Shakespeare, the Bible, horror books & thrillers, medical textbooks, and books by or about anyone who shortens the name "Richard".

[jgaiser]

I think that *anyone* worried about these words needs to quit reading, quit watching television, quit going to movies and probably quit going out in public.

See: Thomas Bowdler

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by clintiepoo

This tool replaces the words with blanks.

Ridiculousness of the venture aside; when you say replace with blanks, do you mean one blank for each word found? If I lost my mind and attempted to do something like this myself, I would certainly use something other than a blank to indicate a word went away. That would make some awkward reading otherwise. Some special combination of characters (XXXX) would make more sense (relatively speaking of course) to me. That way I could more easily anticipate mentally inserting my own shucky-darns on the fly.

And seriously ... assize???

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

And seriously ... assize???

Well it *does* have the ass word as part of it. Can't be too careful.

The whole list is really ridiculous. If you really need to remove the seven dirty words, I guess I can understand. But this list is a bunch of *icky* words and once again you would be better off just not reading modern books.

[meeera]

*is tempted to share her recipe for cumquat & kaffir lime marmalade...*

[Maggie-Me]

Why not just read religious books or children books? Or does the Bible have curse words?

Serious question, most "great books" published are realistic and will contain words or situations that may offend some people.. but isn't that life?

[kristalana]

Originally Posted by Maggie-Me

Why not just read religious books or children books? Or does the Bible have curse words?

The Bible has lots of the words from this list, so I guess that's out too.

Really though, that this even exists is such a bummer to me (whoops I said bum). What a way to approach the world.

[PeterT]

This is just another version of bowdlerizing, no more, no less, albeit one done with no attempt to preserve meaning.

[alanHd]

I hope you don't Mind me censoring your name has you cant have poo.

Each to there own I suppose, for me those words are an integral part of the story and besides whos to tell me what words are good or bad, Words can have different meanings across different cultures, I understand the word Fanny in the USA has a different meaning than here in the UK.

[arjaybe]

Let's be fair to clintiepoo. They don't want to censor everyone's books, just offer a way for like-minded people to censor their own books. 'kay? You wouldn't criticize someone for posting a pattern for furniture leg skirts, would you?

[Achilles]

I'd just like to point out that "pollock" is a type of fish and "mung" is a type of bean. That is all.

[user743]

Originally Posted by kristalana

The Bible has lots of the words from this list, so I guess that's out too.

Really though, that this even exists is such a bummer to me (whoops I said bum). What a way to approach the world.

I dont knew what you're talking about but the only Torah (bible) that exists which was given by go-d isn't even english rather the origanal Hebrew

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by user743

I dont knew what you're talking about but the only Torah (bible) that exists which was given by go-d isn't even english rather the origanal Hebrew

So now we are censoring the Christian Bible altogether just because it was made up?

It still exists, and is still the Bible (albeit of a different religion) and I am fine with that despite being a very much Traditional Orthodox Jew...

[theducks]

Hey guys!
You appear to be on the edge of the rules.

Maybe you should take this to the Hardened Debaters (only shows if you opt in)