• Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, August 25, 2010 1:49 PM

Kindle sales are booming, but all is not well for Amazon and its ambitious e-book business. Indeed, "A month after jolting the book industry with a deal to give Amazon exclusive digital access to some of the country's best-known literary works, literary agent Andrew Wylie is largely abandoning the agreement," reports The Wall Street Journal. The Amazon deal was reportedly reached after Wylie failed to agree to terms with publishers for electronic rights to his authors' existing titles.

According to The Journal, it represented a major deal in the war between Amazon and its two biggest rivals in the booming e-books business -- Apple and Barnes & Noble. Alas, "Bertelsmann AG's Random House, which published 13 of the 20 titles at issue, had disputed Amazon's right to sell the titles in digital form," reports The Journal. It boycotted new offerings by all of Mr. Wylie's clients, putting some of the New York agent's famous authors, including V.S. Naipaul and Dave Eggers, at a disadvantage. Going forward, "Random House will now distribute the electronic versions of the works to all retailers after Mr. Wylie reached a truce with the publisher and agreed to terms for the titles."

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