PayPal Threatens To Drop Smashwords For Selling Adult Content

PayPal notified ebook publisher Smashwords that it would no longer provide payment-processing services to the company unless it took a series of actions to censor the adult content section of its site.

The details of PayPal’s requests are unimportant to the story’s relevance in the payments industry’s business community. However, a copy of the email sent to affected Smashwords authors is available at Smashwords’ website.

In the email, ”¨Smashwords founder Mark Coker says other e-bookstores have also been affected by PayPal’s decision to begin “aggressively enforcing a prohibition against online retailers selling certain types of ‘obscene’ content” in “the last couple weeks.”