A COLD war between publishers and agents over the profits from e-books has erupted into an open conflict that could reshape the book industry.
Britain’s Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie, the most feared and powerful of literary agents, announced that he has set up Odyssey Editions to create e-books of classics such as Lolita and Midnight’s Children.
Publishers immediately hit back with one of the largest, Random House, questioning the legality of the operation, and one author predicting “the implosion of the whole publishing model”.
Mr Wylie earned his nickname by poaching authors from rival agencies over 30 years, building up a list that includes Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth. Now, having failed to agree with publishers the size of cut they should take from the digital sales of his authors’ work, Mr Wylie has decided to cut them out altogether.
Odyssey Editions, in an exclusive partnership with Amazon’s Kindle store, will publish electronic versions of the books on Mr Wylie’s formidable backlist that it believes do not have allocated e-book rights.
Odyssey opened for business in Britain yesterday, offering 20 titles by, among others, Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Roth and John Updike, all in electronic form for the first time. Each e-book will cost about $11: British readers will have to buy them through Amazon’s US site.
Electronic books made up only 2.5 per cent of the books sold in the US in the first quarter of 2010 but are a rapidly growing segment of the market. The arrival of improved reading devices, including the Kindle, the Sony Reader and Apple’s iPad, has increased excitement around a section of the market that is seen as key to the future of a struggling industry.
Tom Holland, chairman of the Society of Authors, said the move was “very good for established authors” but could “trigger the implosion of the whole publishing model. This has to be the worry: that big, swinging dick agents will go their own way”.
Publishers are clinging desperately to their e-book profit margins because they are frightened that the internet will eventually become the primary market and at the moment readers seem unwilling to pay print-book prices for digital versions.
In April Mr Wylie told an interviewer: “Yes, I have a Kindle. I used it for an hour and a half and put it in the closet.”
That now looks rather like a feint.
His ambitions for the new publishing company are global but he also admits that he is happy to pull the plug on it if it frightens the publishers back to the negotiating table. “It can be dismantled with the flick of a switch.”
Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House in the US, said it had written to Amazon disputing its rights to sell these titles.
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