Knife Music Approved in the App Store

Rejected by Apple on account of containing “objectionable content,” David Carnoy's e-book, Knife Music, has finally been approved in the App Store. The author decided to scrub some of the few lines containing the “intolerable” language. As a result, the book can now be found in the iTunes App Store.

Towards the end of December last year, Apple rejected the iPhone-based version of Knife Music, written by CNet's David Carnoy. According to Apple, the book simply wasn't App Store material, due to the “objectionable content” found inside.

But how did Apple find the content? Surely, staffers don't just pick up and read every e-book that is submitted for approval. We didn't think so, and neither did Alex Brie, the developer of Knife Music.

According to Apple's SDK, “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive, or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgment (sic) may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

Without fail, Apple rejected Knife Music, providing a sample of one particularly graphic section. However, Alex Brie believed that the company was checking to ban non-appropriate content using word-matching software. This may pose a problem for future books hitting the venue, but, so far, at least one such problem has been solved.

Carnoy said the content he was forced to extract didn't amount to all that many words, so nothing had really changed with the book.

“I decided to censor because it wasn't that big a deal. I changed it very little. It's more important to have people check the book out – along with the whole concept of ebooks on the iPhone. It's kind of virgin territory now, but it's going to be really big soon,” Carnoy said in an e-mail.