reported by Aggie Villanueva

I’ve known about Smashwords for a while, but never bothered to sign up until I heard that they support Operation eBook Drop, which allows their authors to donate free ebooks to soldiers around the world fighting for peace. I’m now a proud Smashwords author.

But there are many more benefits for ebook authors. Especially in the last few months, expansion is booming and Smashwords is breaking barriers for electronic authors. Yesterday Smashwords announced a distribution agreement to supply their ebooks to the Amazon Kindle Store.

Smashwords is no longer just an ebook publishing platform. Barnes and Noble also distrubutes Smashwords ebooks.

“Until today, it was difficult if not impossible for many independent authors and publishers to gain such mainstream digital distribution. Now with Smashwords, virtually any deserving author, anywhere in the world, can receive broader distribution for their ebook.

“This is an important milestone for Smashwords. Fifteen months ago when we launched, we were an ebook publishing platform for self-published authors. Earlier this year we opened our services to publishers. And today, we expand our role to that of an ebook distributor as well.

Smashwords ebooks are now distributed via multiple online channels, including Smashwords.com, Stanza (the e-reading app used by 2 million + people on the iPhone/iPod Touch), Aldiko (for Google Androidphones) and soon, the Barnes & Noble network (Barnesandnoble.com, Fictionwise, Ereader app, others).”

They’ve already signed with Sony for Smashwords ebooks to be sold at the eBook Store from Sony. Concurrent with the Sony Publishing Platform relationship, Sony will soon begin distributing Smashwords ebooks.

Smashwords explains how to be part of all their distributions.

“As part of this development, we’re creating a Premium Catalog, which contains Smashwords titles that meet the mechanical requirements for distribution. We posted a page to inform our authors and publishers about how to gain inclusion in the Premium Catalog.”