D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library is proving that libraries aren’t just for books – they’re also for 3D printing and book-making. The library is using its $3.4 million grant to provide a publicly accessible 3D printer and an Espresso Book Machine for on demand book printing – great for students and self-publishers. Printing is five cents per gram plus $1 (they say most print jobs costs between $1-$5). The library also has plans to include a “Dream Lab” where users can collaborate on projects ,test drive tablets and e-readers prior to purchasing, and also publish personal novels.

Library manager Nicholas Kerelchuck is optimistic about the library’s 3D printing service as an educational tool:

They’re learning math skills, engineering skill, hard science skills…this is future job experience. I think that in 10 years if someone has experience using a 3-D printer, they are far ahead of the curve.

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Self-publishing company Smashwords has speeded up its eBook retail release capabilities, making the process of releasing and making changes to an eBook quicker.

Changing the price of an eBook, which used to take about a week, now takes a day or two for Kobo and a few hours for Apple’s iBookstore. Smashwords founder Mark Coker explains in his blog: “This means you can change a price from your Smashwords Dashboard and the new price, in multiple currencies, will reflect across Apple’s 32 iBookstores, often within an hour of your change.”

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For David Thorne, a NYT Bestselling author, self-publishing has been more profitable than working with a traditional publisher.

In fact, the author has made more money from his newly self-published book I’ll Go Home Then; It’s Warm and Has Chairs, than he did from his book The Internet is a Playground, which was published by Penguin’s Tarcher imprint.

After feeling underwhelmed with his publisher’s design and feeling that he had done all of the work marketing his first book, Thorne decided to use Lulu.com to self publish his second book. “I wanted to do something different.  For my first book, the publisher took a lot of control over the layout.  I was not happy with the typeface.  I hated the cover. I had no say over any of that,” Thorne stated. Read more

Digital publishing technology company FastPencil has a new publishing platform to make your own eBooks. The company announced the new platform today which has various different tiers. Self-published authors can use the tool for free to make a book and publish it to the Kindle Store, iBooks, Nook and distribute through Ingram. They can also make up their own imprint using the tool.

There is also a tier in which authors can pay for design and editing services. Publishers can use the tool to format and distribute eBooks. In addition to these DIY tools, publishers can now license FastPencil software to convert content to an eBook. Read more

eBookNewser caught up with Francis Tapon, author of the new book The Hidden Europe, to talk about self-publishing, crowd sourced editing and eBook pricing.

EBN: Why did you decide to self-publish your book?
FT: My brother, Philippe Tapon, went the traditional route. He had an agent and published two books with Dutton Press. He got a modest advance and so-so marketing support. It was clear that publishers do little marketing. They depend on authors to do it.

Even in 2006, when eBooks were just 1% of the market, I believed that they would grow to over 50% of the market within 10 years. (Today it’s about 20%). eBooks destroy two of the key advantages and costs of publishers, printing and distribution. Although their costs have decreased, publishers have hardly shifted their royalty rates. They are unwilling to pay more than 20-25% royalty for eBooks, sometimes they pay just 10-15%. Meanwhile, if you self-publish with the major eBook distributors you’ll get 65-70%. Is the editing and cover design that publishers do worth giving them such a big slice of the pie? I didn’t think so, especially when they provide little or no marketing support. Read more

BookBaby announced Thursday that they now have now 3 new retail partners. Baker & Taylor, Gardners, and eBookPie have each agreed to add titles distributed via BookBaby to their catalogs.

For a self-pubbed author, this is a fairly important piece of news. BookBaby is now the most widely distributed self-pub service. They’ve even passed Smashwords in terms of the number of channels. Baker & Taylor is a name all should recognize. They’re a major book and media distributors in the US, with over 1.5 million eBook titles in their catalog.

Gardners is one of the larger retail distributors in the UK, and BookBaby’s 8 thousand current titles will be available to Gardners’ partners via the Gardners Hive, their web-retailing platform. BookBaby will be joining the Google eBookstore and other distributors carried by Gardners in their catalog of over 150,000 eBook titles.

eBookPie is an innovative eBookstore startup that is experimenting with selling eBooks by the chapter and section. They currently stock over 300,000 titles.

In another ode to self publishing, DIY author J.A. Konrath posted a blog this week where he revealed that he earned $100,000 grand on Amazon in the last three weeks.

Here is more from his post: “This is just for my self-pubbed Kindle titles. It doesn’t include Shaken and Stirred, which were published by Amazon’s imprints. It doesn’t include any of my legacy sales, print or ebook. It doesn’t include audiobook sales. It doesn’t include sales from other platforms.” He shared his sales report of sales from this year on his blog and we’ve included the infographic above.

Despite the fact that the holiday retail season is over, Konrath is still doing well this month. In fact, the author says he has is averaging “well over $3500 a day” for January.

The eBook distributor BookBaby announced yesterday that they’ve gone analog. In addition to distributing your eBook to iBooks, B&N, Amazon, and other eBookstores, BookBaby can also now provide short production runs for paper books.

The new service is intended to offer authors an option to print between 50 and 100 copies at a time. That’s not really enough to compete directly with POD, but it does give authors a chance to print a enough copies to have them on hand at conventions and book signings.

BookBaby set itself apart when it launched back in 2010. Rather than take a cut of your eBook sales, BookBaby distributes eBooks for an upfront change and a small annual fee. It was launched by the folks behind CDBaby, the CD production service.

BookBaby

It’s only been a couple weeks since the release of the German and French translations of the Style Guide, and today Mark Coker, the CEO of Smashwords, announced that the Smashwords Style Guide was now available in its 4th language. Thanks to the generous volunteer effort of Giuseppe Meligrana, authors now have a chance to make molto bene eBooks.

Joking aside, this translation is part of Smashwords efforts to expand to support more countries and more languages. Smashwords supplies ebooks to iBooks and Kobo (among several other eBookstores). iBooks recently expanded to include 26 more countries in Europe, including Italy. Kobo is also planning to launch in Italy in the near future.

With the growing market and the growing need for authors to self-publish, Smashwords plans to get ahead of the curve. They’re also going to release translations in more languages, and they have translations are in process for Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Bengali.

Earlier this week, Penguin announced that its social networking site for writers has added a self-publishing feature, but not everyone is recommending it.

Best selling self-published author J.A. Konrath has written a blog post warning new writers who are considering self-publishing to consider other routes. In the post, he warns writers about Book Country’s fees for formatting eBooks and the cost for uploading these eBooks to retail stores.

He writes: “Why would you pay Penguin to upload your titles? That’s the easiest part of the self-publishing process. But wait, there’s more. Penguin also keeps 30% of your royalties. So not only do you pay them, you also keep paying them.”

In the post he advises young writers of less expensive or flat out free ways to get your eBook formatted and submitted to eBook retailers. Konrath punctuates his point with dollars and cents. He goes on: “These people charge a flat fee and you keep all of your rights. Which means that when you upload to Amazon.com and sell an ebook for $2.99, you keep $2.05, not the $1.47 Book Country gives you. And trust me. That adds up.
I’ve sold 500,000 ebooks. If I’d published with Book Country, they would have taken $290,000 in royalties from me. That’s just awful.”