Not unlike the music and movie industries, the book-publishing industry has been wrestling with how to adapt to the digital age. While books may not be swapped online by the millions, the way that songs and movies are, the Web has still forced authors and publishers to look at how they do business and whether that needs to change. Some authors, such as Brazil's Paul Coelho, have even taken to "pirating" their own books by uploading copies to peer-to-peer filesharing networks, and even some major publishers are experimenting with giving chapters away online for free.

Mark Coker, founder of a Silicon Valley public-relations firm that specializes in working with startups, says he started Smashwords.com as a way of trying to help authors deal with the realities of life online. An author himself -- of a novel co-written with his wife about the behind-the-scenes lives of actors on a soap opera -- he says he realized how difficult it was to find a publisher as a new author, and thought the Web should be able to help.

At Smashwords, authors simply upload their novels as Word documents and then decide how much they want to charge. Users can then download the chapters or books as "e-books" that can be read on mobile devices, including Amazon's Kindle electronic-book reader -- all without any digital rights management or DRM controls. Smashwords keeps 15 per cent of the revenue from the book downloads and the author gets the rest, Coker says. Authors are also encouraged to give away chapters as a way of promoting their work.

The site opened for "public beta" testing on May 6, and has about a dozen authors signed up already, Coker says. And his big dream is that "someday, some aspiring author who lives in a hut in Tanzania, and who has to travel 3 hours by bus to the nearest town with an Internet terminal, publishes a breakout book on Smashwords and touches millions of people. How cool would that be?"