Andrew Wiley, representing literary heavyweights like Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, both alive, and among others the estates of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov, has done a deal with Amazon to make many of these works available for the Kindle platform.
This is, however, not a step of authors taking publishing in their own hands, and the Author's guild is not entirely happy with this solution. Wiley is replacing one middle man (the publishers) by another, the agent. It is self-publishing in the hands of the wrong selfs.
No matter where we stand on this — this is certainly only the beginning of a number of changes in the author-agent-publisher-dealer-reader chain. It will be interesting to see what the parties do next.
