andrew wylie

Random House and top literary agent Andrew Wylie have settled their fight over his plans to publish e-books of older works from big name authors he represents. But while the battle is over, the settlement announcement raises more questions than it answers about the future of e-publishing.

Investors hammered Amazon over it's underwhelming second-quarter results. That's no biggie for the online retailer, though. When it comes to e-books, Amazon remains top dog, and it looks very likely to stay that way.

For more than 50 years, writer John Updike's exclusive U.S. publisher was Knopf, and he sold his writing without a literary agent. A year after his death, a particularly persistent agent has landed him as a client: Andrew Wylie, who may be signing up for a number of headaches.

Any publisher worth its salt will tell you that the real money in the business doesn't come from the current bestsellers by Stephanie Meyer and James Patterson, but the backlist: that deep catalog of books that were published years ago. Titles like J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye...