Last Friday Penguin had a birthday party. There was no cake, just armfuls of new books, mostly classics with contemporary designs, celebrating the establishment of the company by Allen Lane 75 years ago to the day. Lane was one of the most disruptive forces in the history of book publishing. He challenged every notion of how a book should be packaged, priced and sold. He showed how publishers can add value in the journey from a finished manuscript to a book in a reader’s hands and, in the process, created the most distinctive brand in the industry.

Yet that value has been repeatedly questioned over those 75 years, never more loudly than today. Last week, this newspaper speculated on the death of publishing in the context of a little local difficulty between Andrew Wylie, the world’s most powerful literary agent, and Random House, the world’s largest consumer book publisher. Mr Wylie had announced that he was creating a publishing imprint called Odyssey to sell e-books on an exclusive basis to Amazon, eliminating the need for a publisher. Random House, whose authors constituted the majority of the Odyssey list, responded by saying that they would buy no further English language books from Mr Wylie until he desisted.

No one, not even Mr Wylie, is greatly excited by the commercial prospects of Odyssey. The digital rights to almost all books are owned by the publishers themselves and, as a result, Odyssey will make available only those few titles in which the rights have been reserved by the agent. Penguin has just one title on the Odyssey list, a minor Saul Bellow novel from 1951. The roof is not falling in on us book publishers just yet.