From the Los Angeles Times:
Amazon.com now has exclusive rights to sell the e-book versions of some of the best-known titles from top literary authors Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike and more. In an announcement late Wednesday -- shortly after midnight Thursday, East Coast time -- the online retailer revealed that a deal with the powerful Wylie Agency will give Amazon.com the exclusive e-book rights for two years to books such as "Lolita." The e-books will only be available through the Kindle store.The initial Odyssey Editions booklist? Voila:
“London Fields” by Martin Amis
“The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow
“Ficciones” (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges
“Junky” by William Burroughs
“The Stories of John Cheever” by John Cheever
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
“Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
“The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer
“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
“The Enigma of Arrival” by V.S. Naipaul
“The White Castle” by Orhan Pamuk
“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson
“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike
“Rabbit Redux” by John Updike
“Rabbit Is Rich” by John Updike
“Rabbit at Rest” by John Updike
“Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh
And here is what is so very clever about this move - every undergraduate student in the English-speaking world (should they read more than one English Lit course) will buy all of these books.
Probably on a Kindle. (Here's what's not clever: they might just download an illegal PDF and read it on an iPad.)
Odyssey Editions will be many things, but they will also be apublisher of text books for the English Lit academic market.
A very smooth move.
Wags guess-timate a 25% market share for ebooks in 10 years. That's as conservative as a Baptist at a Bob Jones bake sale.
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