(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

8 ways Amazon is delivering orders faster, from drone delivery within hours to Same-Day Delivery of fresh groceries

From demand forecasting to specialized delivery vehicles, here’s how Amazon is bringing faster delivery speeds for a better shopping experience.

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.

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A couple of items from the trad side of the business.

Book Sales Down

From Publishers Weekly:

Unit sales of print books had a slow start in 2026, according to data from Circana BookScan. Total unit sales fell 3.1% compared to a year ago for the quarter ending March 28, 2026, dropping to 163.5 million copies sold.

The young adult category had the steepest percentage decline.

This last bit concerns me. Is it phones, tablets, TikTok, or whatever else that keep kids from novel-length fiction? Are parents buying fewere books to give to their kids?

Book Deals Hard to Come By (File this under “New, What Else is?”)

Getting a traditional publishing deal has always been a challenge. Is it harder now? A column in USA TODAY says:

About 81% of Americans feel that they have a book in them, according to an often cited survey reported in The New York Times (from the early 2000s). Many aspire to write and publish a book in their lifetime, but only a small fraction see their work formally acquired and announced each year. A little over 2,000 fiction writers announced deals in 2025 on Publishers Marketplace.

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[W]hen people ask, “Can anyone get a book deal?” what they’re often asking is something else:

• Is this still possible for people who aren’t famous?
• Do I have to know somebody in the industry?
• And if I do everything “right,” will it still take years?

In short: Yes, no and maybe. A book deal is attainable – to some extent. It’s also not a finish line. 

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The publishing industry is consolidating, which means fewer imprints (and fewer editors)…When editors are stretched thinner, the time it takes to nurture talent – especially debut authors – shrinks. The industry’s ability to take a slow bet on a writer, to develop them the way record labels develop musicians or sports teams develop rookies, becomes increasingly rare.

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Even when the book is good, “we have less places to sell things than we have in the past,” Carly Watters, senior literary agent at PS Literary, told USA TODAY. “A lot of things are more predicated on the appetites of a smaller group of people … there might be separate imprints, but they all share an editorial board meeting.”

Quality aside, a novel also has to be “sellable” to stand out in those meetings. “In my experience, (books) that are easily pitchable, meaning we can sum up – hook, line, sinker – in one sentence, that’s something that I can get people’s attention with,” Watters added. There are gorgeous books that are hard to summarize, she said. The kind you want to hand someone and say, “Just read it, then call me.”

Those books can sell. But it’s harder.

The article’s author spoke with a literary agent Eric Smith:

Plenty of his clients come from cold querying (sending an email or form pitch) with no connections in the industry. But also, his inbox – when he’s open to submissions – can reach thousands in a few months. Smith estimated he received around 3,000 submissions over roughly 90 days and signed a handful last year.

That number can seem terrifying until you remember something important: Most of those submissions weren’t “bad writers.” They just weren’t the right fit. Or the timing was wrong. Or the market was saturated. Or an editor had just acquired something similar. Or an imprint closed. Or an editor got laid off. Or the editorial board said, “We already have a slot like this.”

You can do everything right and still lose to the invisible calendar of the industry.

Consolidation makes that sharper. Smith described it plainly: Agents can’t send five projects in a row to the same editor without burning that bridge.

So yes, it can be more challenging now; not because the “gatekeepers” hate writers, but because the gate is servicing fewer lanes.

Comments welcome.

(Kay DiBianca is currently on hiatus)

Over at Authors Guild:

“The model clauses below cover important aspects of AI uses of author’s works: specifically, prohibiting AI use of an author’s work without the author’s consent; licensing specific AI uses as subsidiary rights with fair compensation; protecting audiobook and translation rights from AI uses without the author’s approval; and governing the author’s permissible use of AI in submitted manuscripts as well as the publisher’s use of AI in connection with the work. Authors and agents may request that publishers use any of these clauses, and publishers are free to adopt them.”

Re: Authors:

“Author shall disclose to Publisher if any AI-generated text is included in the submitted manuscript, and may not include more than [a de minimis/5%] AI-generated text.”

Re: Publishes:

The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into public, consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from the authors or adequate guardrails to ensure that the manuscripts are not used by AI companies for training.

Uploading or inputting a copyrighted work or an author’s personal information into public, consumer-facing AI systems without permission may constitute a violation of the author’s copyright or right of privacy, and it puts the author’s intellectual property and personal information at risk. Editors, agents, and others in the industry who have access to authors’ works should not upload their manuscript to or otherwise prompt consumer-facing chatbots with any author’s works without first getting the author’s written permission. Further, where consumer-facing chatbots are used in workflows, publishers and other industry professionals should ensure that they opt out of having the work used for training. All of the common chatbots provide this option. Publishers should also take care that any internal AI systems are sandboxed models with guardrails to prevent the manuscripts or author information from being used as inputs for training.

Publisher shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy without written permission from the author or as otherwise agreed to hereunder; and when such permission is granted, it shall ensure that the manuscript is not used by third-party AI companies for training, such as by opting out of allowing training in user settings.

And:

To prevent injecting any AI-generated text into an author’s work, publishers should not use AI to substantively edit manuscripts, with the exception of basic spelling and grammar- checking applications.

Publisher agrees and warrants that it will not use AI to substantially edit a manuscript (excepting the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications).