Interesting news in the publishing world today as The Wylie Agency have determined to take some of their backlist and publish them as e-books on their own, meaning that they’re bypassing the book publishers. In response, Random House, who own the publishing rights to many of Wylie’s authors have determined that they will not enter into any new english language publishing agreements with Wylie authors.
?The standoff is the most dramatic yet in the dispute over what agents and authors want to receive and what publishers are willing to pay for e-books, an increasingly vital market. Updike’s four “Rabbit” novels and Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” are among the 20 famous works coming out for the first time in electronic form, not through a traditional publisher, but through Odyssey Editions, founded by the Wylie agency, where clients include the estates of Updike and Saul Bellow and such living authors as Rushdie and Philip Roth.
Curious to me is the fact that Wylie have decided to publish exclusively through Amazon/Kindle. Meanwhile, iBooks has a pretty thin list of titles in their ebook store…
Around the NPR hallways over the past 10 years and some, it’s been the tendency to think of him as a sweet old grandfather. That’s not how [Mike] Wallace remembered him. “He’s never been sweet,” he said.
“There was not a lot of small talk in Dan,” Wallace said. “And Dan had told me that. He had come the hard way, so to speak, and he wanted to make a name for himself in broadcasting, in news and he did not suffer fools gladly and he was not particularly interested in nonsense or pablum.”?
In my mind, Apple is just another in a long list of companies who make the mistake of following their own vision — like Porsche or Nike. Whatever happened to just fitting in?
Another one of my Mac Gem reviews, Flying Meat FlyGesture, is now available at Macworld.com. FlyGesture is a great little free utility that lets you use mouse and trackpad gestures to perform a multitude of tasks.