Let no one say that Andrew Wylie ignores where the money is.

Mr Wylie, the agent who made his name by extracting large advances for authors of print books from publishers, has turned his attention to digital rights. He has signed an exclusive deal with Amazon that allows the online retailer to sell electronic versions of 20 old books by famous Wylie clients including John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Hunter S. Thompson.

The deal, which has outraged Random House sufficiently that it has suspended dealings with The Wylie Agency, has prompted worries that publishers are going to be disintermediated, with agents packaging books for clients and distributing them digitally, without having to worry about the messy business of printing books and paying bookstores to arrange them artfully on front tables.