In E-Publishing Revolution, Rights Battle Wears On

The publisher Random House is in a dispute with the powerful Wylie Agency over an exclusive deal Wylie recently signed with Amazon to sell digital versions of some bestsellers -- books like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man that came out before e-books even existed.

"When an agent becomes a publisher, that is sort of contradictory," says bestselling author and Authors Guild President Scott Turow. Turow says the guild is concerned that Wylie may have a conflict of interest in taking on the role of both publisher and agent. The guild is especially critical of Wylie for signing an exclusive deal with Amazon -- which dominates the digital book market in both electronic readers and e-books -- but it's also troubled by Random House's response that it wouldn't do business with any of the English language authors Wylie represents until the dispute is resolved. Turow says something like that only hurts the writers. "I think the most amusing part of it is that we're gonna beat up on those poor authors who have Andrew Wylie as their agent, but we're not gonna take anything out on the behemoth Amazon," Turow says. "In other words, we're gonna walk down the beach and kick some sand in the face of the 99-pound weakling." Understandably, writers are worried about royalties. Amazon angered the publishing industry when it set the price of an e-book at $9.99 — much lower than the cost of a hardcover — which, Turow says, has already had a negative effect on writers' compensation. But writers also want more than the 25 percent royalty most major publishing houses have been offering for digital rights. That's an issue Jane Friedman, a former CEO of HarperCollins who co-founded the digital publishing company Open Road, says can't be resolved until the question of who owns the rights to older books that were published before the advent of digital publishing is settled.