Bookstore Sales Jumped in November (publishersweekly.com)

The U.S. Postal Service is harming both publishers and itself with its current ratemaking process, the News/Media Alliance (NMA) charges in a letter to the Postal Rate Commission. “While the Postal Service incurs record losses, Periodicals mailers have been forced to make difficult business decisions ranging from cutting staff to shuttering titles and closing their doors, all of which ultimately harms our society,” the letter states. Since 2021, the USPS has raised periodical rates “generally twice a year by a cumulative total of 47.8 percent,” the NMA writes. “During that time, the portion of those increases due to the additional rate authorities have exceeded the rate of inflation by more than 150 percent.”

The United States Postal Service announced it will soon publish a Notice of Intent to supplement its environmental impact statement (EIS) related to its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) plan. The decision comes as the Postal Service accounts for expected changes following a recently announced plan to improve the Postal Service’s delivery network. The plan to modernize and aggregate delivery operations will make delivery routes more efficient, which may affect the appropriate mix of vehicles to be procured for the Postal Service’s delivery fleet, including NGDV. “As I noted when we placed our initial NGDV delivery order, the Postal Service would continue to look for opportunities to further increase the electrification of our fleet in a responsible manner, as we continue to refine our operating strategy and implement the Delivering for America plan,” said DeJoy. “A modernized network of delivery facilities provides us with such an opportunity. This is the right approach —operationally, financially, and environmentally.”

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Wiley announced the launch of Wiley AI Partnerships: A Co-Innovation Program. This initiative aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency and accuracy of scientific discovery. A new Wiley survey revealed that 69% of researchers want to keep up with or be ahead of the curve in AI adoption in their field. At the same time, they require better tools to streamline their research and are looking for guidance and training about how to use AI responsibly and effectively. This new program is intended to help solve these challenges in collaboration with partner companies and researchers with the goal of improving the efficiency and caliber of research worldwide. “Researchers and practitioners are seeking more than generic AI tools – they need relevant applications that enhance and support their research endeavors. This new partnership program is designed to meet these needs by inviting collaboration with start-ups and scale-ups to deliver specialized AI solutions,” said Josh Jarrett, Senior Vice President and General Manager for AI Growth at Wiley. “Our goal is to accelerate AI tool development to unlock new discoveries, empower researchers to uncover hypotheses, run analyses at scale, simulate experiments before wet lab investment, connect findings to existing research, and enable global collaboration.”