Smashwords
ebook retailer
Smashwords, Inc., based in Los Gatos, California, is a platform for self-publishing e-books. The company, founded by Mark Coker, began public operation in 2008 and was acquired by Draft2Digital, LLC in 2022.
Authors and independent publishers upload their manuscripts as electronic files to the service, which converts them into multiple e-book formats for various devices. Once published, the books are made available for sale online at a price set by the author or independent publisher.
History
Coker began work on Smashwords in 2005 and officially launched the website in May 2008. Within the first seven months of launching, the website published 140 books. Due to initially low profits, the firm switched to a distribution model that offered retailers a "30% commission in exchange for digital shelf space". Smashwords achieved a profit in 2010 and has distributed some of its books via Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and KDP, Amazon.com's e-book publishing website.
In 2012, Smashwords announced that it would partner with 3M Cloud Library, which would allow for the option for their authors' books to be available in libraries, and that it had reached about 127,000 titles by 44,000 authors.
Coker, a former Silicon Valley publicist, started Smashwords in 2008 with the claimed goal of using technology to democratize publishing—allowing writers to appeal directly to readers without having to deal with gatekeepers such as agents and editors.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Smashwords” is ebook retailer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Smashwords, ebook and retailer, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7544282. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2022, 2005 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Smashwords” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.