San Jose Mercury News: Written any good e-books lately? A Q&A with Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a free digital publishing platform launched last year that allows anyone to become an e-book author.
As regular readers know, I’ve been an advocate of pushing the book industry into the digital age long before my book Darknet was published by Wiley. Excerpt:
With Smashwords we help independent self-published authors publish e-books on their own so they simply upload their finished manuscript as a Microsoft Word file into our system and then we automatically convert that file into about 10 different e-book formats so these books can be read on the iPhone, on the Amazon Kindle and on virtually any other e-book reading device.
How is Smashwords different from self-publishing services like Lulu, Wordclay or Createspace?
With those services you go to their Web sites and you upload your manuscript as a Microsoft Word file and they allow you to publish in print, very quickly, within days. I think those are great services and I recommend those services. The difference with Smashwords is Smashwords is focused entirely on electronic books, digital books.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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