Which is what I thought, too.
This does raise another question, though. If you use Smashwords, is there any advantage to also load your work directly to Apple (and Kobo, etc)?
As regards your specific ?, of whether there is advantage if you use Smashwords for you to also upload directly yourself: I would check with Smashwords, but it would seem that this would be unwise if your eBook is already on a seller website. Adding it a second time will be confusing to readers; might be a violation of your agreement with Smashwords; and probably is a violation of the terms of service agreement with any eBookstore website.
If you have created the ePub yourself, or paid a one-time fee to someone else to create an ePub for you AND it meets all of the requirements of a "seller website eBookstore" then the advantage would be a potential financial one. Instead of paying a portion of your royalty to Smashwords continuously, you get all of your royalty. The break even point if you paid a one-time fee is something you need to figure out. {For a simple eBook it seems that reputable people charge <$100 to give you an ePub file). An individual author can upload directly to at least Kindle, B&N, and iBookstore without an intermediary. As far as I know this is not currently possible for Kobo, but they expect it will be by summer.
The small company that I work for is not currently using Smashwords, and for others using them might have other advantages. We have the in-house expertise to create an ePub exactly how we want it, verify it exhaustively ourselves, and then where possible upload to selling vendor website. This is not possible for Sony for an individual author to do, so we will eventually use Smashwords or some other intermediary.
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To those who indicate that it is the job of their publisher ...
I hope that they are doing a good job on your behalf, and have no reason to imagine otherwise.
For us being knowledgeable about the eBook world, rules, and game either allows us to do things ourselves, or at least ask appropriate questions of those we might hire, and thereafter be able to monitor whether they are continuing to do a good and effective job. Everyone has a different business model including how much monitoring they do of any vendor they hire. It seems like there is plenty of anecdotal comments on this and other forums that would indicate that some publishers are not very good at the eBook game. At an even larger player level, there are those who say that B&N really is doing a poor job in the eBook arena, and they can supposedly hire some of the best "expertise."
However a lot of this is really for a different thread, and most of it is differences in style and opinions. There are many "right ways" to approach it.
