(Note: Kay DiBianca is currently on hiatus)
Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery Expands
From Amazon News:
Amazon’s Prime Air service is rapidly expanding and plans to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the United States by the end of 2026—a sixfold increase from its current footprint—bringing ultrafast drone delivery to communities with tens of millions of customers across the country.
Amazon’s diverse operations: warehouses, delivery, and pharmacy services
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Prime Air offers the widest selection of items by drone, including millions of groceries, electronics, cosmetics, medications, and household products at everyday low prices, delivered in as fast as 30 minutes.
Prime Air drone delivery sites have the highest average delivery volumes in the U.S., with thousands of deliveries made daily. Prime Air drone delivery currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon.
“Customers already turn to Amazon for fast Same- and Next-Day Delivery, and Prime Air provides them an even speedier option when they need it, with deliveries in as fast as 30 minutes,” said David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air. “We’ve already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages to customers by drone this year, and by the end of 2026 we plan to reach customers in nearly 500 cities and towns. We’re pairing the convenience of ultrafast drone delivery with the low prices and selection customers love about Amazon.”
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Don’t Panic Over Gen Z Readers (h/t Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line)
From The Conversation:
A trove of recent articles bemoan the collapse in recreational reading among younger Americans, with COVID-related reading declines, artificial intelligence and social media often described as causes.
But as the authors of “How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books,” we think many claims about Gen Z’s reading behaviors miss the mark.
Some long-standing, influential studies aren’t designed to capture how Gen Z often reads: multimodally – bouncing between print, e-book and audiobook for the same book – and on web platforms such as Wattpad, Webtoon, Kindle Unlimited, DC Universe Infinite and Marvel Comics online.
In fact, according to our 2025 data, a growing proportion of Gen Z – 66% – is identifying as readers, up 14 percentage points from 2022. In the previous 12 months, 65% of Gen Z read at least one print book, up from 59% in 2022. These findings roughly correspond with those of the Pew Research Center for the general population across all ages.
In other words, Gen Z shows us that reading isn’t dying. It’s changing….
Identifying as a reader used to mean sitting alone with a book. That is less true for Gen Z than any previous generation. Gen Zers are more likely to experience reading as a social activity.
The growing popularity of silent reading parties, where groups of people come together to read quietly and independently, suggests that Gen Zers enjoy finding community around books, even as they immerse themselves in a largely solitary act. We also note how some young people are bridging the distance between story worlds and real life by participating in literary cosplaying, in which readers dress up as characters from their favorite books and gather at conventions or themed events. Then there’s “book excerpt aesthetics” – a social media trend in which readers post memorable passages and quotations from books.
Unionizing at Hachette (From PW)
Last month, around 600 Hachette Book Group workers joined the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, forming the largest trade publishing union in history.
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In each union’s public statements, employees expressed strikingly similar reasons for organizing: inadequate pay, large workloads, and limited potential for advancement. They all cited, in their own words, what HBG organizer Julia DeVarti, an associate editor at Little, Brown, called publishing’s “passion tax”—workers’ tendency to “be exploited for working in an industry we love.”Oftentimes, the impact of the passion tax is most visible in corporate publishing, according to NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss. Entry-level employees come in because they love books and might “initially give up decent pay and decent benefits, because they can then say, ‘I’m working at one of the Big Five publishing companies.’ ” Many times, he adds, these sacrifices become permanent fixtures of employment.
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An organizing committee member at Dark Horse, who spoke with PW on the condition of anonymity, says they and others who were hired during the pandemic spearheaded the union drive for similar reasons. In August 2024, Dark Horse ordered employees near its Portland, Ore., offices to start coming in two days per week, after being fully remote since the start of the pandemic. In addition to the added transportation costs, a wage freeze implemented in December 2024 and rising insurance premiums worsened workers’ quality of life, according to the organizer, even after raises resumed this January.
The specter of AI has also heightened workers’ sense of uncertainty. The NewsGuild has so far won AI protections in 90 different contracts across the journalism and publishing sector, Schleuss says. The model clause he shared with PW prohibits employers from replacing employees with AI or using automation to decrease salaries.
In many cases, these are preventative guarantees. University of Chicago Press, for example, prohibits its authors and peer reviewers from using AI and is not using AI tools internally, according to senior promotions manager and organizer Adrienne Meyers. Still, she says, she wants to “make sure that doesn’t change if a management position changes, or if the university puts pressure on us.”
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When the HWC went public, Hachette distributed anti-union infographics around its Manhattan offices. The posters, which the HWC shared on its social media, framed unions as “third parties” intruding on the manager-worker relationship.
A Hachette spokesperson explained to PW at the time that the publisher meant to “encourage workers to consider all the facts to make an informed decision” in their union election.