I listened to a podcast interview the other day with innovative Smashwords.com founder Mark Coker, and as always I found him to be an interesting, imaginative guy who is attempting to do important things. He mentioned that his company has been experiencing some formatting difficulties getting its titles accepted in the Kindle Store, but that it is continuing to work with the Kindle team on the issues and has experienced some success selling independent authors’ works on other platforms including iBooks, Kobo, and the Nook.

So I was surprised to find this morning that there are about 60 Smashwords titles available now in the Kindle Store. The vast majority are erotica, available for the most part at very low prices, and let’s just say they are not for the faint of heart. Although I haven’t sampled any of them as of yet, the array of titles suggests that many of them concern themselves with incest.

Those preoccupations did not match my sense of the overall Smashwords catalog when I’ve visited its website, and without getting into this too deeply it made me wonder if the thematic concentration might have the effect of creating some unintentional and perhaps unwanted branding for Smashwords.