Do not write off book publishers just yet
By John Makinson
Published: August 2 2010 22:09 | Financial Times

Last Friday Penguin had a birthday party. There was no cake, just armfuls of new books, mostly classics with contemporary designs, celebrating the establishment of the company by Allen Lane 75 years ago to the day. Lane was one of the most disruptive forces in the history of book publishing. He challenged every notion of how a book should be packaged, priced and sold. He showed how publishers can add value in the journey from a finished manuscript to a book in a reader’s hands and, in the process, created the most distinctive brand in the industry.

Yet that value has been repeatedly questioned over those 75 years, never more loudly than today. Last week, this newspaper speculated on the death of publishing in the context of a little local difficulty between Andrew Wylie, the world’s most powerful literary agent, and Random House, the world’s largest consumer book publisher. Mr Wylie had announced that he was creating a publishing imprint called Odyssey to sell e-books on an exclusive basis to Amazon, eliminating the need for a publisher. Random House, whose authors constituted the majority of the Odyssey list, responded by saying that they would buy no further English language books from Mr Wylie until he desisted.

No one, not even Mr Wylie, is greatly excited by the commercial prospects of Odyssey. The digital rights to almost all books are owned by the publishers themselves and, as a result, Odyssey will make available only those few titles in which the rights have been reserved by the agent. Penguin has just one title on the Odyssey list, a Saul Bellow novel from 1953. The roof is not falling in on us book publishers just yet.

The concern is that Odyssey represents the thin end of a large literary wedge. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad have created an enormous market for digital books in the US, with Amazon now reporting higher sales of e-books than of hardcover titles. Where the US leads we presume others will follow. If agents were to withhold digital rights from publishing houses and go direct, so the argument runs, publishers could become irrelevant. But this is most unlikely to happen. The skills and talents that support the publication of physical books are equally relevant in the digital world, and publishers would be doing authors a disservice if they acquired the rights to physical books alone.
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