Thursday, March 15, 2012

Smashwords Versus Paypal???

There has been a really interesting censorship dust-up between Smashwords.com and Paypal. Smashwords is a little company Hamilton Stone Editions and many other small publishers use for free conversions to e-books. They have, along with literary publishers like HSE, a huge number of magnificently awful self-published books- from MY FRIEND THE ANGEL to really rough sex porno. The wildly successful Amanda Hocking started self-publishing on Smashwords before getting picked up by St. Martins for two million dollars or something.

Anyhow, Smashwords is so democratic it's ridiculous.

Then Paypal threatened to stop working with them if they didn't get rid of some of the rougher sex books, and the CEO Mark Coker did a lot of negotiating-- and apparently won. See http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/03/paypal-revises-policies-to-allow-legal.html .

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