Amazon has released a free Kindle Single called President Barack Obama: The Kindle Singles Interview.
In the short digital book, Kindle Singles editor David Blum interviewed our President, getting some commentary on the state of the writing industry. President Obama had this comment in the eBook:
It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper. Now you have a few newspapers that make a profit because they are national brands, and journalists are having to scramble to piece together a living, in some cases as freelancers and without the same benefits that they had in a regular job for a paper. What’s true in journalism is true in manufacturing and is true in retail. What we have to recognize is that those old times aren’t coming back.
Booksellers around the country protested President Obama’s speech at an Amazon fulfillment center yesterday, arguing that Amazon was hurting small business in America.
American Booksellers Association and CEO Oren Teicher had this statement about the President’s speech:
While Amazon may make news by touting the creation of some 7,000 new warehouse jobs (many of which are seasonal), what is woefully underreported is the number of jobs its practices have cost the economy … For you to highlight Amazon as a job creator strikes us as greatly misguided. As you’ve noted so often, small businesses are the engines of the economy. When a small business fails and closes its doors, this has a ripple effect at both a local and a national level. Jobs are lost, workers lose healthcare and seek unemployment insurance, and purchasing decreases.