Recently when PayPal, a financial services company that facilitates online payments for goods and services, told indie publisher Smashwords what it could and could not publish, we expected to see a fast and furious response not seen since 1957. That was the year San Francisco publisher City Lights fought both government and private censors who wanted to shred Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, now a literary classic.
But Smashwords is no City Lights. Although it seems more like the accommodating publishers during Vichy, Smashwords has no parallel.
On one side of history stand brave publishers like City Lights, Olympia Press, and Grove Press, standing firmly against the massive power of government and populist culture—while on the other, Smashwords kneels at the feet of its banker.
