No breasts please, we're Apple

I love the iPad. From a distance, though, and not nearly as fervently as my colleague Kenton Larsen, who has been blogging about his new baby.

Yes, I have run my fingers over Kenton's baby. It's a beautiful device that displays information and connects its users with all sorts of people and things. No doubt the next iterations will be even more beautiful.

But there is a somewhat sinister side to the iPad, as the New York Times reports on June 14, 2010.

According to the NYT, Apple has refused to approve a new comic version of James Joyce's Ulysses as an iPad app until the authors remove a panel that shows a woman with exposed breasts.

That's 77 years after a U.S. judge ruled that Joyce's book is not obscene, opening the door to its wide distribution.

OK, breasts begone, say the authors, although they say they argued with Apple for a while.

What's sinister about that? Just that these authors see the iPad as so appealing and Apple so powerful that they are willing to make their material conform to the company's inscrutable standards of taste.

I hope nobody -- oh, let's say R. Crumb -- tries to create an app for a comic version of the Book of Genesis. I hear Eve is naked in that one.