On Thursday, July 22, the Andrew Wylie Agency announced it
had formed an agreement with Amazon.com for the online bookseller to be the
exclusive supplier of e-book editions written by authors represented by
Wylie.
The Wylie Agency lists 757 clients, the vast majority of whom are writers and writers’ estates, including Dave Eggers, Richard Flanagan, Mary Gaitskill, Ian Frazier, Philip Roth, Anne Lamott, Hendrik Hertzberg, Wells Tower, and the estates of Richard Yates, W. H. Auden, I. F. Stone, and Saul Bellow.
HOW TO GET TO WYLIE WORLD? “DOWN THE RIVER”
Amazon is the company that, when Macmillan Publishing refused to agree to the company’s price demands, removed the ”buy” button from all the company’s titles. Amazon is the company that, once threatened by the George Orwell estate for selling 1984 without their permission, electronically removed the text from its customers even as they read it.
Amazon manufactures a reading device, the “kindle,” which requires its owners to buy digital merchandise exclusively from Amazon – a bit like our selling you books that you could read only by using the bedside lamp you must also purchase from us. And this would be the only way you could read these books. Wylie’s authors’ electronic books will be available only via the kindle, only via Amazon, a soiling of first amendment principles that many of the agency’s authors, such as Arthur Miller and Salman Rushdie, have fought so hard to protect.
As you look at this display, we encourage you to think about the ramifications of this effort to vertically integrate the book industry and limit or exclude access to information and free expression. And, as always, we encourage you to support independent booksellers everywhere. Together we can let books live.
