Thanks, everyone, for your comments.
@ shighfield, thanks for the kind words about our CTO, Bill Kendrick. I think he's great too. In addition to the daily iterations he does on the site each day, he's working on some really cool projects, including something neat for iphone users.
Re: your suggestion of allowing you to come back and send more compensation to the author, one current option to to buy multiple copies, and another item on our roadmap closer to your suggestion, probably a month or two out, is a "Tip me" button. Of course if anyone here has a better label than "Tip me", I'm all ears. One of the reasons I founded Smashwords is because I think authors get a bum deal with most traditional publishers, so we're interested to build our business in such a way that creators get compensated for their hard work.
@ ebookpirate, I appreciate your comments and don't disagree about the need to grow our author base. While I'm thrilled ~ 60 authors have already entrusted their works with us, I won't be satisfied until we add three more zeros to that number, and once we reach that point I'll want to add one or two more. As pshrynk pointed out, we're just getting started. We launched our public beta in May. You mentioned you liked the HTML format. We do offer an online HTML reader for book sampling and reading. Or would you like to be able to download a single HTML file, essentially the entire book in one long page? That's certainly an option I'd be willing to consider. Most of our development roadmap is based on user suggestions.
Best,
Mark