Random House, Wylie and Amazon: Why the public tussle?

I admit, sometimes the questions I ask on Jacket Copy are somewhat rhetorical, but this is not one of those times. What, exactly, is going on with powerful agent Andrew Wylie and Amazon.com and Random House? What do the parties stand to gain from having a public scuffle over e-book rights?

Late Wednesday night, Amazon.com announced it had struck a two-year exclusive deal with several of Wylie's clients to offer e-books for the Kindle. Twenty of the biggest titles in 20th-century fiction -- including Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," "Portnoy's Complaint" by Philip Roth and "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov -- would be available only on the Kindle (and Kindle apps). They would not be sold through Apple's iBook store or any other e-book retailer.

This seemed like quite a score for Amazon, and positioned the Wylie Agency as a new and formidable player on the e-book landscape. But today Random House, which controls many of the titles, called foul. In a statement, Random House, the biggest of the big six publishers, said:

Last night, we sent a letter to Amazon disputing [the Wylie Agency's] rights to legally sell these titles, which are subject to active Random House publishing agreements. Upon assessing our business options, we will be taking appropriate action.

Clearly, Ralph Ellison wasn't thinking about e-book rights when he published "Invisible Man" in 1952. But now publishers -- and agents -- are. Those rights, especially with a book like "Invisible Man," which finds its way to many syllabuses, can be valuable.

Is that the reason for the public fight? Surely someone at the Wylie Agency has Random Houses' phone number. If they wanted to cut a deal with Amazon.com -- a company Random House has maintained a strong alliance with  -- certainly the deal could have been negotiated in board rooms and over coffee, or however the big guys of publishing make these things happen.

Instead, we see a late-night announcement, followed by a public statement threatening "appropriate action." Why take it public? Are we supposed to choose sides? Which one appears to be the winner?

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

Photo: Ralph Ellison and his second wife, Fanny, at home in 1972. Credit: Nancy Crampton / Knopf

---

Clicking on Green Links will take you to a third-party e-commerce site. These sites are not operated by the Los Angeles Times. The Times Editorial staff is not involved in any way with Green Links or with these third-party sites.

---

Comments

[Randy Russell]

The winner? Wylie.

Another interesting aspect is Wylie's creation of an "imprint" for the eBooks on the list. This makes the agency the publisher. With whatever splits amazon.com arranges for the publisher's cut (eBook royalties to authors being based on a percent of the NET to publishers) when an eBook sold... now goes to Wylie. And, one assumes, to the authors and/or authors' estates. A big chunk of money.

While one may wonder that Ralph Ellison did not consider eBooks when he signed his contract with Random House, we might also note that it is highly unlikely he granted his agency the right to publish his work themselves.

Since almost everyone on the list is dead, it would be interesting to discover if the estates signed off on the deal with Wylie to "publish" the works on amazon.com and whether the estate is participating in the publisher's splits or simply receiving a standard eBook royalty.

[Scathach Publishing]

Random House is just being a baby. Their claim to the rights is similar to you buying a cinema ticket and claiming that means you own the DVD. The rights were not in any contract, they were not sold and they were not paid for.

Those meetings over coffee most certainly will have occurred; between Amazon and Wiley. Since Random House do not own the rights, they have no say at all in who Wiley sells them to.

So Wiley sold them to Amazon, which is fair play. Amazon obviously offered the best deal. Maybe Random House should realise this is a market place, not a playground. They have to offer good deals before hand if they want client loyalty, not try to give authors shoddy royalties and then cry about it when the agencies go with someone else.

[Sandi K.]

I think the biggest problem with this is that the books Wylie is signing are going to be available only for Kindle, that puts a lot of consumers out of the loop for downloading these books to other e-readers. It would be great for students and literature lovers to be able to get these books in a digital format, but it sucks that they are locked into Kindle. If you have a Nook, a Sony Reader, or any of the other e-readers coming to the market, you're out of luck. I chose the Nook specifically because it uses the epub format that seems to be turning into the industry standard.

[Sammijo]

There are free Kindle apps for iPad and iPhone, Blackberry and Android, PC and Mac. No, they are not ereaders, but at least there are ways to read these classics without a Kindle.

I am happy that Amazon got these ebooks as opposed to the publishers who made the agency pricing model deal with Apple this spring. Prices of ebooks have gone up a lot because of them, and just like I can't afford an ereader (I use the Kindle for PC app myself) I can't afford $15-20 ebooks. The $9.99 Amazon is charging is still a bit more than I'd like, but worth saving up for.

[Book Publisher]

Very interesting article, I wonder how Wylie will end up faring in the long run. The Wylie deal may increase the race among the makers of electronic readers to buy digital rights to other classic books that will help them win more customers or spark traditional publishers to intensify their claim to the digital rights. Many traditional publishers claim they own the digital rights to backlist titles, in part because they say they spend money on nurturing and marketing an author as well as printing costs, while authors and deceased authors estates say their old or existing contracts do not cover the digital rights for e-books.