In 1957, a few years after her teenage debut with Bonjour Tristesse, French novelist Françoise Sagan crashed her car, got hooked on painkillers, and went to detox. There she kept a journal, published in 1964 as Toxique, with appropriately raw illustrations by the painter Bernard Buffet.
Recently Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, still saddled by tax debt on his mother's estate and looking for new outlets, had the idea of producing a digital edition for the iPhone. He contacted a publisher expert at turning bandes-déssinées into digital versions.
They submitted it to Apple, who rejected it on the grounds that the illustrations—in particular, the breasts and pubic hair shown in the rough ink sketches—would offend the American public. Buffet's son Nicolas rightly objected to the idea of cutting them out.
The solution: The version available on iTunes (still in French) uses animation to scan quickly over the "naughty bits." (It also requires that the purchaser be 17 or older.) The version available at Ave! Comics (for €9.99 or $11.99, same as the iTunes version and quite a bargain at current exchange rates) shows everything in detail.
The moral of the story: At least digital self-censorship doesn’t require pulping a print run.
(From Pierre Assouline's great blog, La république des livres, at Le Monde.)
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