The Wylie Agency decided to strike out on its own this week, publishing 20 eBooks through the literary agency’s brand new Odyssey Editions imprint. These new books will be published exclusively through the Amazon Kindle Store, revealing why Andrew Wylie said eBook deals were “currently on hold across the board” last month.
The first wave of eBooks contain some of the 20th Century’s most important titles: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. These books will be sold for $9.99, all of them available for the first time in eBook format. See the complete list after the jump.
Andrew Wylie had this statement: “As the market for e-books grows, it will be important for readers to have access in e-book format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer … This publishing program is designed to address that need, and to help e-book readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature.”
UPDATE: Other publications analyze the news:
New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Teleread
Future Book
Enhanced Editions
A Reading Odyssey
The authors in the new Odyssey Editions include:
Saul Bellow
Jorge Luis Borges
William S. Burroughs
John Cheever
Ralph Ellison
Louise Erdrich
Norman Mailer
Vladimir Nabokov
V.S. Naipaul
Orhan Pamuk
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Hunter S. Thompson
John Updike
Evelyn Waugh