Title Kind of Says It All

At The Constant Conversation, Soo Jin Oh has penned Amazon Partners Up with Possibly the Most Hated Man on the Literary Scene. She delves into why Andrew Wylie has decided to try and be a “publisher”:

One of the facets of this story that is much to be wondered at is that Random House is continuing to stick to its old story from the Rosetta trial, that its existing contracts cover digital rights. To me, this signals that Random House, along with many publishers, persisted in believing that electronic books would never come to be. Certainly, some of the earliest attempts at e-books that date back to the late 1990s collapsed dismally. However, it would have behooved a company with such important holdings to protect its assets in a clear legal manner. Yet, I am fairly certain that what is true for Random House is true for many houses, that too many of them waited too long to recognize the potential reality of e-books and that a sly agent beat them.