image Smashwords has worked out an affiliate relationship with Wordclay, a print on demand company, to encourage writers to appear on paper as well as in ePub and other electronic formats. Mark Coker briefly discussed this during an audio interview with TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba during Tools of Change. "Authors should publish in print," Mark said—since e-book revenues are just a fraction of those from paper books.

image Electronically, Smashwords books are available not only directly but also through new arrangements under which you can download them within the Stanza program for the iPhone.

In the interview with Paul, Mark touched on many topics ranging from the company’s origins to the number of people who’ve joined the Smashwords site: over 1,100, mostly writers—with almost 250 having actually published. "People are downloading the books…People are starting to sell books, not a lot—we’re still in the very early stages of the site…We’re getting fan mail from authors everyday for getting their books out to be read."

Mark on DRM:  "The author are generally positive about.. ‘DRM free.’ In the last nine months I’ve probably only fielded two or three questions from authors" asking how to "protect" their books. "When I tell them about the downside of DRM, they all say, ‘Thank you, that’s fine.’..We’re very much against DRM at Smashwords. We think that if you’re imposing DRM on your customers, you’re treating them like criminals and not giving them the ability to enjoy the book the way they want to enjoy the book."

Related: MP3 of interview with Mark.

NO COMMENTS

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.
http://teleread.com/teleread-audio-interview-smashwords-encouraging-self-pubbed-writers-to-go-pod-as-well-as-e/
teleread.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-13
176178
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PUSM6TBMZ7NLFFIMY7G4OUUSR2UVLKZ5
<urn:uuid:f71d3fd6-30bc-405c-a1cd-c12ddfe71a01>
2017-03-29T07:20:40Z
192.241.132.143
sha1:RTFCIL47FF22JGQQEI2FEIVBHUYIHUH5
<urn:uuid:54e50e08-239f-48d9-af19-db567f3d3e46>
http://teleread.com/teleread-audio-interview-smashwords-encouraging-self-pubbed-writers-to-go-pod-as-well-as-e/
response
<urn:uuid:93e16bef-11f7-4c30-88c5-f009efd623a5>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-233-31-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-13
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf