Bookeen announced taht the Odyssey e-reader will launch on November 22nd in Europe, for "less than €150". The Odyssey is a 6" touch E Ink Pearl e-reader with a fast processor (a 800Mhz TI Cortex A8) and Bookeen's own HSIS technology (high-speed system that supports full-motion video and scrollable browsing). It also has Wi-Fi support. Via E-Reader-Info ...

The Bookseller notes that Penguin is now negotiating with the Wylie Agency over e-book rights for the three Penguin titles Wylie was publishing through Odyssey Editions. This comes shortly after Random House struck a deal with Wylie over its 13 of Odyssey’s 20 books. If Penguin succeeds in extricating its e-book rights from Wylie’s clutches, that only leaves Odyssey with four titles—and it’s anyone’s guess how long those will stay once their print publishers come calling now that Wylie’s been shown to be willing to deal. Not really so much of a publisher anymore, is it?...

The Financial Times has an interesting article (free registration or Google News search required) covering controversial literary agent Andrew Wylie’s possible further plans. Wylie caused publishers to see red when he took twenty backlist titles whose e-book rights were not covered by contract and published them via Amazon. Wylie says that he is trying to promote the importance of unifying the print and digital revenue streams. In an interview, Mr Wylie said he preferred to negotiate a deal with publishers that combined the print and digital rights, but had failed to reach a satisfactory compromise...

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

From the Authors Guild site: We don't know the details of the Odyssey-Amazon agreement, but we can make some informed guesses. The agreement is most likely under the agency model, with Amazon paying Odyssey 70% of the retail price of the books. Wylie and Odyssey are together taking a typical agent's commission as compensation: 10 or 15% of the 70% received from Amazon. In round figures, this means that the author receives 60 to 63% of the retail price of the book. For comparison, a typical contract with a traditional publisher pays e-book royalties of 25% of net proceeds. If the e-book...