Today the digital book service Shortcovers announced a new partnership with the digital self-publishing outfit, Smashwords. Starting November 18, Smashwords will to share titles from its nearly 5,000-strong collection of eBooks, a library drawn from 2,300 different self-published authors and small publishers.

Shortcovers has built an global infrastructure for reading digital books across multiple devices, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre , Google Android and Sony Reader. GalleyCat caught up with Smashwords CEO Mark Coker to find out more. "From the beginning we wanted it to be a global platform--but Shortcovers created the infrastructure," he explained. "A lot of US publishers tend to be US-centric and they sell rights to other places. The beauty of eBooks is that publishers can reach a broader market easily at a low cost," he continued.

Coker concluded: "Online retailers will be extremely important in the [eBook] supply chain. That's why we are signing these agreements with Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Shortcovers. In print book world for the last couple centuries, publishers have controlled distribution. What we're doing is democratizing distribution."