As has been noted, smartmedia is just plain NAND; any card reader is likely to have trouble mounting it as it will be attempting to read the low-level format so it can present a logical block-style device.

Really the only thing you can do is to pull the raw data off with some sort of device programmer. On the upside, being old, smartmedia cards are SLC NAND and you'll probably get most of the sectors off without needing to bother with the ECC data. On the downside, without lots of understanding of the format and how remapping might be working, you'll just have a load of 512 byte sectors which may not be very easy to group into actual JPEGs.

Maybe these guys are worth trying?

http://www.smartmediarepair.com/html/image_recovery.html

$20 seems pretty cheap if they can do the job...

Hugo