Adam Leeb is the Cofounder of Astrohaus, the makers of the Freewrite Distraction-Free writing tool. He is a product designer and mechanical engineer (MIT graduate)

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THIS WEEK’S INDIE PUBLISHING NEWS:

Bezos Reveals Amazon Prime has 100M Members — In Amazon’s annual shareholder letter, CEO Jeff Bezos gave the typical call for the company to live up to “ever-rising customer expectations,” and touting Amazon’s high standards at every level. The letter also contained some interesting news in the form of information that all the world has wondered about: Just how many subscribers does Amazon Prime have? The number, as it turns out, is 100 million. Meaning Amazon not only makes around $9.9-billion per year on the service, it also has the eyes of a hundred million vetted customers, willing to spend even more money with the retail giant. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge, now that I have it. But I’m impressed, Jeff. *slow clap* — http://bit.ly/147-Bezos

ALLi is Betting on Blockchain — If you’ve followed news about Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, then you may have some vague knowledge of what “bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” mean. And you might also have heard of Blockchain. The idea, in the simplest terms, is that blockchain is a sort of digital ledger for transactions made with cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin. If that didn’t clear anything up, think of it as a more or less foolproof way to do a digital transaction, much more in line with the way you’d do a physical transaction. In other words, if I pay for your physical book, you get your money and I get the book. I can’t then replicate the book with a few mouse clicks and resell it, keeping the original and maybe repeating the process. Blockchain would effectively prevent anyone from being able to sell a digital version of your book, without at least giving up their digital version. It’s a way to make digital products more like their physical counterparts. And the Alliance of Independent Authors sees this as a great way to give authors a more complete ownership of their intellectual property, allowing authors to have more control, and be less dependent on giants such as Amazon KDP. They’re calling it Self Publishing 3.0, and they’ve released a white paper that gives the full details.  — http://bit.ly/147-blockchain

Amazon Wins First Arbitration — In September 2017 Amazon filed for arbitration against at least five authors and businesses accused of violating Amazon’s terms of service, essentially scamming the system to make quite a bit of money. Amazon has won the first of these arbitrations, against a British business owner. Amazon has asked the court to enter judgement in line with the January award issued by American Arbitration Association. Jake Drya, the UK business owner, is ordered to pay damages after arbitration determined he knowingly manipulated KDP, violating their TOS. Dryan’s business was doing crazy stuff, including publishing duplicates of books that were already available, using bots to increase page views. All of which violates Amazon’s TOS.— http://bit.ly/147-Amazon

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