Sony Partners with Smashwords
September 29, 2009 – 4:42 pm by Thomas GideonI saw this on Wired, a piece by Eliot van Buskirk. Sony is thankfully the lesser part of the story as it turns out. What Smashwords is doing is building a one stop site for self publishing ebooks through partnerships with not only Sony, but also Barnes & Noble and Stanza, among others.
This is actually a competitive offering to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for doing very much the same thing, except Smashwords is far less limited:
Smashwords says it pays “much higher royalties” than Amazon, distributes to multiple outlets, and does not apply DRM to the eBooks the way Amazon does.
It is unclear whether the lack of DRM applies to Sony who has earned my ire by adopting ePub for its new crop of readers but only after saddling it with DRM. I suspect Sony may be an exception because of the way the article calls out that Sony in particular is accepting submissions worldwide, compared to Amazon which only does so in the US.
van Buskirk concludes with the biggest remaining challenge to innovators like Smashwords, that is filtering. But such a problem to have now that the flood gates have been opened wider for the independent creator and for advocates and fans of open media.
