Publishing's Best Worst Friends

The leaders of American “literary culture” are worrying, gathering and organizing:

The Wylie Agency has about a thousand clients. Many have not yet responded to Mr. Wylie’s query about Authors United, because they are traveling or are inattentive to email. But about 300 Wylie writers have signed on, as well as the estates of Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Hunter S. Thompson.

“Every single response without exception has been positive,” Mr. Wylie said.

There is no reason to doubt that the responses experienced by Andrew Wylie, an extremely powerful agent, have been uniformly positive: His fight on behalf of the publishing industry, against an obviously imperious Amazon, is one that his peers and clients, living and undead, have been itching for. In the process of mounting it, he will likely provide an easy target for Amazon’s defenders, who claim that the old publishing world is stale and elitist and unadaptable, and that it overestimates its own value.

Neither of these parties will reach the most valuable readers, who generally appear to be sympathetic to Amazon in their use of e-readers but who are probably mostly concerned with two things: The impossibly daunting number of books that they haven’t yet read (to enjoy reading is to always feel literally one million books behind); and the price and availability, on dirt-cheap e-readers, of way more than enough of these books to keep them buried and happy. To put it another way: The point at which the death of Wylie’s vision of literary culture becomes an effective cudgel is the moment that an avid-but-otherwise-unaware reader picks up an e-reader, browses the selection, and realizes that, among the thousands and thousands of could-reads and should-reads and what’s-thats, something has gone missing. Not a single book, or a well-known writer, but some beloved tier of work that was previously allowed to exist by an industry that, at this uselessly distant future time, is long gone. Wylie’s famous authors are more than worthy foes for Amazon. They’re also probably better advocates than their industry, which will misapply their talents on dead-end antitrust cases and dissonant pro-publisher crusades, deserves.

Image by Hope for Gorilla.