Does it pass the Scunthorpe test? This is the first, whimsical, question that occurred to me when I read that a couple in Idaho have produced a new app that automatically removes naughty words from ebooks. Will Clean Reader – slogan: “Read books, not profanity” – set Ted Lewis’s 1970 crime classic Jack’s Return Home (aka Get Carter) in the steel town of Sbottomhorpe?

Hush now. This is serious. Prudes can set their filters to “off”, “clean”, “cleaner” or “squeaky clean”. “Sex” becomes “love” (if only the transformation were so easily made in the real world!), “penis” becomes “groin”, “fucking” becomes “freaking” and the hardworking epithet “bottom” now stands in for “vagina”, “anus”, “buttocks” and “clitoris”. Clean Reader is already cherishable, then, for its comic effects; to say nothing of the arousing guessing-game it creates: we all know striptease works because of what’s covered, not what’s revealed. “Freak my bottom” now opens a whole world of interesting possibilities. I haven’t yet settled the Scunthorpe issue, incidentally, but in Get Carter both “pissarse” and “wank” slip through, so we live in hope.

But the reaction to this bush-league silliness seems to me very interesting. On the Today programme this week Joanne Harris – who has written a fierce blogpost on the subject titled Why I’m Saying ‘Fuck You’ to Clean Reader – seemed to want the app banned. She’s complained of its “very strong Christian bias”, and thinks changing “bitch” to “witch” might be offensive to modern pagans (to say nothing of female dogs). She mentions Victorian Bowdlerisation, Nazi book-burnings and Isis smashing up the ancient artworks of Nimrud.

All Twitter seems to agree with her – indeed, those involved this week took fright and yanked the ebookstore from the app, pending unspecified changes. There was much celebration at this news, not least from Harris herself, who declared herself “delighted”. But I’m not sure I can join in. Whether Clean Reader is 1) grotesque philistinism, 2) censorship, or 3) a violation of intellectual property, (and it may well be 1), but not 2) or 3)), depends on whether you see it as an attack on the rights of the writer or a vindication of the rights of the reader. Think of them as neighbouring countries with a very busy trading relationship but strong border controls.

When it comes to writer-land, we – by which I mean sensitive liberal types with a series of firm received ideas about what art and literature are for and how they work – are very much in favour of artistic freedoms. Censorship is the enemy of art. Intellectual property – which is how writers earn the money to live and the time to write – deserves protection. And what the writer puts on the page is his or her damn business.

In 1947, it was in this spirit that Raymond Chandler wrote to his publisher: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”

All quite right. Just across passport control and the other side of customs, though, there can’t be a GCSE English student in the land who has not at one point been told that “every reader’s interpretation is valid”, or introduced to a version of this idea; diffusion-line Death-of-the-Author stuff. The poet Robert Lowell, reading his poem Skunk Hour once, remarked to the audience that “John Berryman … said that the skunks were a catatonic vision of frozen terror. But Dick Wilbur said they were cheerful emanations of nature.” Beat pause. “That’s the advantage of writing in an ambiguous style.”

We can all decide for ourselves whether Lowell’s skunks are scary or friendly. The individual reader’s sovereignty goes further, though, and in less theoretical ways. We can choose our own route through the text. We can skip and skim, go back and reread. If we want to skip the pastiche Victorian poetry in AS Byatt’s Possession and just read the prose of the story, we can. If we want to give up halfway through Wolf Hall, we can. If we want to change the typeface or the font size, our e-readers already allow us to do it. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I daresay, would be a shade less oppressive in 16-point green Comic Sans.

We can wear coloured spectacles. We can shade our response with background music whose mood complements or competes with that of the text. We can highlight passages in fluorescent pink, cross them out altogether or – and here’s the thing – as owners of a physical book we are quite within our rights to go through with a biro systematically scribbling out the word “fuck” and replacing it with the word “freak”, or “kiss” or “tomato”. (“Tomato me hard in my bottom, Christian Grey, you big stud!”) Clean Reader, looked at from one perspective, does no more than automate this process.

You could make the sort-of moral case against it that, by automating the process, it allows the reader to cheat: at least if you’re scribbling out “fuck” by hand you have to engage with the author’s original text. This is a cousin of the argument that vegetarians sometimes make: if you’re happy to eat sausages, you should be prepared to kill and butcher an animal yourself; you should be able to look that pig levelly in the eye. There’s something to that, but I don’t think it carries the day.

Reconfiguring existing texts, often mechanically, has a respectable pedigree in experimental writing. The examples are here, there, and everywhere. The Dada poet Tristan Tzara volunteered to create a new poem by pulling the words of a chopped-up newspaper article at random from a bag (in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties he does it with Shakepeare’s Sonnet 18). William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s experiments with cut-up and fold-in carried the torch forward. And the modern writer Jeff Noon – infatuated with the sample and remix culture he saw around him in dance music – devised in his 2001 book Cobralingus what he called the Cobralingus Engine, whereby an “inlet” text would be passed through a series of “filter gates” or transformations, flowchart-style, to produce something substantially new.

Now, Clean Reader does not seem to have anything like that sort of artistic ambition. It makes what you could call a weak claim on its source-text. Its notion is not to produce a new text for redistribution, but to apply a voluntary filter to an individual reader’s experience. That may impoverish the reader’s experience. It may ruin the writer’s carefully achieved effects. It may indeed be crashingly philistine and ideologically insidious. But it’s firmly on the reader’s side of the DMZ.

The makers of Clean Reader may have caved to the Twitterstorm. But there’s a perfectly respectable case that they should have told all those angry writers to tomato off back to Scunthorpe.

• This article was amended on 30 March 2015. An earlier version described Scunthorpe as a mill town.