If you own an iPad and read Playboy for the articles, it’s your lucky day.
Playboy has launched a paid iPad application that – per Apple’s porn app crackdown – features no nudity.
The iPad app – priced at $4.99 an issue, the same as a physical copy – features most of the content (front-of-book, the Playboy Interview and other features) from Playboy’s current issue in HD format. Most, that is, except for the naked women.
Playboy’s iPhone app also features no nudity. Oddly, you still have to be at least 17 to download the app, and Apple warns that it could “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity” and “infrequent/mild profanity and crude humor.”
While users might complain about paying print price without the, uh, money shot, Playboy probably won’t make a stink about it. After all, the magazine has been trying the last few years to transcend its reputation as a nudie rag to something more akin to Maxim -- in an effort to attract more advertisers. (So has Penthouse, for that matter.)
The magazine, for example, recently launched the Smoking Jacket, a suitable-for-work blog. And Hugh Hefner – who wants to take Playboy private – said recently he’s “not a big fan” of hardcore content.
Via a recent appearance on Howard Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources”:
Hefner: I'm not a big fan of the most explicit kinds of pornography.
Kurtz: Some people would be surprised to hear that.
Hefner: Well, some people don't really pay much attention. They don't really know what I'm really all about. I'm a romantic and I always have been. And I think, as a matter of fact, someone observed not long ago, as a matter of fact it may be in the documentary, that my rosebud is really love.
