President Obama isn't just giving a speech today at an Amazon warehouse in Tennessee — he's also sitting down for an installment in the company's new Kindle Singles Interview series. Politico reports that Obama will speak to journalist and Kindle Singles editor David Blum for a long-form interview that will be released for free on Wednesday. Obama will be the second person featured in the series, as well as the second president; an interview with Israeli President Shimon Perez debuted last week.
It's a major coup for Amazon in terms of publishing, and coming out right after the speech, it's also an indirect validation of the President's support for Amazon as part of the new high-tech economy. Publishers and workers' rights advocates, however, have criticized Obama's decision to give a talk on middle-class jobs in an Amazon warehouse: the former point to Amazon's "de facto monopoly" status in the US market, and the latter bristle at legitimizing the relatively low-paid, unstable, and sometimes health-endangering work found in the warehouses.