I find it strange that The Guardian wants to call Amazon's effort a publicity stunt, but when a Sydney company announced plans for the world's first Book-delivery-by-drone back in October, The Guardian was happy to run that story without any skepticism:
Why not just use digital versions of the textbooks? I like physical books over "ebooks" but it seems like an incredibly wasteful service to shuttle around physical textbooks.
As far as why the difference in coverage? I would guess that a company like Amazon generally announces these sorts of initiatives when they're pretty much available, which makes the "earliest in 2015" bit turn this into a big PR stunt imo.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/15/drone-book-deli...