"There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States," says Andy Hunter, the founder/CEO of Bookshop.org. Fast Company checks in on his site, which gives over 80% of its profit margin to independent bookstores, structuring itself as a B Corporation (a for-profit company certified for its social-impact) while providing an alternative to Amazon and other online booksellers: Hunter created Bookshop.org in January 2020 to help independent bookstores survive by utilizing e-commerce... "There were over 5,000 bookstores in the American Booksellers Association in 1995, which is one year after Amazon launched. By 2019, that had gone down to 1,889, so more than half of them disappeared." He says he never could have predicted how the pandemic would accelerate his company's growth... "All these stores that had been trying to get around e-commerce or never really launching or building their website, they had to sell online. That was the only way they could survive during the pandemic...." "Our goal is to help independent local bookstores get their fair share of online sales, which would end up being maybe 10% of Amazon's market share," he says. "And right now we're at about 2%, so we have a long way to go. But a lot of people didn't even think we could ever get 1%...." Bookshop.org has given almost $47 million back to local bookstores. For Hunter, it's not just about the money but changing the way society thinks. He's delighted that many big organizations no longer use Amazon affiliate links, choosing to send people his way instead. "People have absorbed the message that they should support independent bookstores when they buy books," he says.

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Forbes estimates he's worth roughly $110 billion, "placing him ahead of Bill Gates." And now Changpeng Zhao, the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, "has written a memoir..." It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese.... Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump... In Zhao's telling, the case brought by multiple U.S. agencies was less about what Binance had done than about what it had become... "It didn't make sense to me, or any of my lawyers. Other than the fact that we were the biggest in the industry." The U.S. government alleged something more specific: that Binance failed to implement programs to prevent or report suspicious transactions — including those tied to Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades, Al Qaeda, and ISIS — while also processing trades between U.S. users and those in sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran, North Korea, and Syria. In total, regulators alleged the exchange willfully failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions, including those involving terrorist organizations, ransomware attackers, child sexual exploitation material, frauds and scams... The final settlement amount — $4.3 billion, split across the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission — was the largest corporate penalty in the history of nearly each agency involved. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time of the announcement: "Binance became the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed." The prison passages are among the most vivid in the book. Zhao says he was worried about extortion because the media had reported he was the richest person in U.S. prison history, but then realized no one read the WSJ or Bloomberg or recognized him. Zhao also writes about the food, the routines and the specific indignity of confinement, including sharing a cell with a man serving 30 years for killing two people... Writes Zhao of his cellmate, "Soon, I discovered that the most lethal thing about him wasn't his murder conviction, it was his snoring. He snored more loudly than thunder strikes, the sound of which rose even above the constant toilet flushings." Binance at one point held a roughly 20% stake in Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX and about $580 million in FTT tokens, the article points out. "As FTX neared collapse in late 2022, Zhao writes, Sam Bankman-Fried called to ask for a couple of billion dollars 'nonchalantly, as if he was asking for a bologna sandwich.' "Some believe that Binance's brief show of interest in acquiring FTX, followed by its abrupt withdrawal from the deal, hastened FTX's spiral into bankruptcy..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

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Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted. For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.

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