Wylie Agency authors and authors’ estates (Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Louise Erdrich, John Cheever, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Evelyn Waugh, Oliver Sacks, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, Martin Amis, and Jorge Luis Borges) are going to be published electronically — and exclusively, for two years — to the Kindle store, and only the Kindle store.
Big trade publishers (your Random Houses, Penguins, and Harper Collins) are predictably unhappy about this (they spend the money to acquire, edit, produce, market, and sell the physical copies of these authors’ novels), as the (probably correct) impression is that Wylie and Amazon are riding on their coattails with what they’re doing.
This is clearly Amazon’s next move in its war to be the dominant player in the market for books. It’s pretty uncool to try and force people to use the Kindle, though. I also know who is actually producing these ebooks on behalf of Odyssey Editions, and unless they have some sort of super airtight contract with both parties, what’s to stop them from cutting the software company out altogether (Amazon is a software company, after all)? Surely Amazon knows the ins and outs of Kindle much better than they do.
Other authors are also dealing direct with Amazon and Apple to release exclusive ebooks, which is fine if they’ve made that conscious decision (and still hold the rights) to ignore other platforms. Maybe an interesting side effect would be a small uptick in sales of physical books if ebooks are not available for some devices.
I’m finding it pretty complex trying to imagine the fallout / effects of this. The books are mostly backlist (i.e. older books) — are people more likely to buy a backlist title in ebook format? Should traditional publishers look hard at their backlists and design covetable new editions (a bookshelf of beautiful books is just so much sexier than a page on a screen)? There’s apparently a huge issue with ebook royalties — I would propose that if authors were keen to command higher royalties, they should be much more willing to work harder on marketing and publicity online, since the online space is exactly where readers expect authors to reach out to them.