Literary Agent Andrew Wylie Makes Exclusive E-book Deal with Amazon - Publishers Out and Unhappy
- By Thomas McKinney
Andrew Wylie
By Tom McKinney
The debate over what to do about backlist titles in e-book form heated up this month as literary agent Andrew Wylie's new business, Odyssey Editions, made a two-year exclusive deal with Amazon.com to publish twenty classic titles from authors under his agency, such as Philip Roth and the estate of John Updike, as Kindle E-Books. Disputes over who owns the e-book rights to older classic titles have surfaced after Mr. Wylie's exclusive deal essentially set a precedent in telling publishers they don't own electronic rights.
Many traditional publishers claim that because of the money spent to support authors, and on hard copy prints, they own the electronic rights to those books. Authors and their estates have come back stating that if their books were published before e-books existed, those digital rights were not sold to the publishers. Mr. Wylie was quoted by the New York Times as saying, "The fact remains that backlist digital rights were not conveyed to publishers, and so there's an opportunity to do something with those rights."
Mr. Wylie's literary agency has more than 700 clients, but the initial deal with Amazon will start with just twenty titles. While the number is small, the deal has drawn a large reaction from the publishing community. Random House, owner of the print rights for many of the titles listed under Mr. Wylie's deal, has responded: "Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved." They are also disputing the legality of the agreement.
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Literary Agent Andrew Wylie Makes Exclusive E-book Deal with Amazon - Publishers Out and Unhappy
- By Thomas McKinney
An example of Odyssey Edition E-Book Presentation on Amazon
Other readers and publishers around the world have spoken out against the deal for one major reason: the exclusivity. Macmillan CEO John Sargent said, "I am appalled, however, that Andrew has chosen to give his list exclusively to a single retailer. A basic tenet of publishing is that our function is to reach as many readers as we can. We disseminate our books and the ideas within them as broadly as possible." And this makes sense to me: for the next two years, if you happened to already own a Barnes & Noble Nook or Sony E-Reader, every title on the list is inaccessible to you. Only Kindle users and devices that support the Kindle application (like the iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) may download the e-books. There are, of course, traditional printed versions, though books do go out of print.
The significance of the move is not that Amazon.com has twenty exclusive classic e-book titles that its competitors do not. The ability to read those e-books on a Kindle-enabled device will likely be the deciding factor for few readers. No, the significance stems from the fact that digital rights for older titles are being acted on. And not only that, but traditional publishers are being bypassed entirely. This couldn't have happened in print, but without the printing cost for e-books, it entered the realm of possibility. Now, we'll wait and see how the legal proceedings play out.
Below is a complete list of the twenty titles already available on Amazon.com as Kindle e-books:
- London Fields by Martin Amis
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
- Junky by William Burroughs
- The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul
- The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
- Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
- Rabbit Run by John Updike
- Rabbit Redux by John Updike
- Rabbit is Rich by John Updike
- Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
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