Saturday, December 25, 2010

Sex Sutra puts iPad in "awkward position"

Cult of Mac.com [with commentary and images by Wisdom Quarterly]


A freak but moist flower
tangles my lungs, knits into my heart,
crawls up my throat
and sucks like octopi on my tongue.
- "The Love Plant," US poet Anne Sexton

A small publishing company called Peter Pauper Press announced an iPad version of a print book called The Little Black Book of Kama Sutra. [Kama refers to "sexual pleasure," not karma, and a sutra is any discourse on a single "thread" or theme].

The book is part of a continuing series of “Little Black Books” and “Little Pink Books.” Other titles include The Little Black Book of [how to break the fifth Buddhist precept] and The Little Pink Book of Etiquette.

The Kama Sutra book is very much in line with a growing trend of publishing books as interactive apps instead of as e-books. The only trouble is that the book is sexual in nature [there goes the third precept*] and illustrated with photographs [of alluring positions that will make one wish one had practiced more yoga].

The publisher isn’t even going to try to get it past Apple censors [why is Apple, Inc. going the way of Google? It's because prescribed morality is good for business. And what's good for business will be shoved down consumers' throats]. But instead [the publisher] intends to distribute independently rather than through the iTunes App Store.

The Kama Sutra puts Apple in an awkward position.

The content is really an Indian religious text [on sex and sensual enjoyment because India did not always have the hang ups about sex we and it now do] that predates the fall of the Roman Empire.

For Apple to simply ban such works (note that Apple has not banned, and reportedly will not be given the opportunity to ban, the book) is to risk a thriving black market in content that many may prefer to Apple’s own store or worse, a reputation for having an inferior set of content maps to Google’s Android platform. More>>

[It all comes back to business and labeling users "consumers" until we believe that's all we are and are meant to be. We'll we've got a message for Apple: Love the computers. But, hey Jobs, relax on taking over the world by dominating every infotainment platform that arises, because the tentacles of two rapacious Bill Gates octopusses (octopi) are going to strangle us all. But that's what American-style Capitalism is all about. So on second thought, yeah, ban books, limit iPhones to AT&T, and conquer the e-book experience. It's the "American" way.]

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