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One thing of particular interesting to me, being in Australia, is how these distribution companies deal with tax for international publishers. Both Amazon and Smashwords find it necessary to have you submit a U.S. tax file number, if you don't they will withhold tax. For some reason BookBaby did not find it necessary to do this. (My guess - and it is only a guess - is that Amazon and Smashwords both work as if they're publishers* (even though they're not), while BookBaby work purely a distributor.)
It's not a huge issue, both Amazon and Smashwords offer relevant details for getting your own number and so on. But the inconsistency seems strange (and so potentially unnecessary). It would be good if it wasn't required.
* Smashwords even goes to the extent of insisting you use "Smashwords Edition" on your copyright page - unless you submit and epub and then convince them that it's the same epub you use everywhere else so it's obviously not a "Smashwords Edition". They've been very good and quite fast about this each time, but it is a little annoying that it should be necessary.
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