Could the Andrew Wylie/Random House stand-off happen in Canada?
Andrew Wylie, arguably the world’s most powerful literary agent, and Random House, the world’s largest English-language publisher, are playing a high-stakes game of chicken. It began on July 21, when Wylie announced the creation of Odyssey Editions, a digital publisher that would release e-books by some of the authors in his fold, including Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabokov, which would be sold exclusively through Amazon. Random House, which claims it holds the electronic rights to many of these titles, launched an immediate counterstrike: “Until the situation [was] resolved,” it would no longer do business with his agency. Wylie was no longer a confrere but a competitor. “It was not a decision that we took lightly,” Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, told the Post. “It’s unprecedented for Random House to take such an action, but it’s also unprecedented for a literary agency to set itself up as a direct competitor of ours, selling editions of ou
