Digital publishing site Smashwords has published more than 5 billion words as of this week. The words make up 138,071 books.

Smashwords founder Mark Coker blogged the news last night. He wrote: “If you typed at 25 words a minute without pause, it would take 200 million minutes to write 5 billion words.  3.3 million hours.  If you typed 8 hours a day, it would take 416,600 days, or 1,141 years.  Imagine the lifetimes of creative output now captured, packaged, immortalized and available for discovery at the click of a button or mouse.”

According to Coker, Smashwords retailers will sell $18 to $20 million worth of eBooks this year. Currently, five Smashwords authors rank on the top 20 titles in Apple’s iBookstore.