FEAR and loathing among the movers and shakers of America's publishing industry have reached new heights with both Random House and Macmillan denouncing the literary agent Andrew Wylie's move into digital publishing.

Home to 700 authors and estates ranging from Philip Roth to John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges and Saul Bellow, the Wylie Agency shocked the publishing world on Thursday with the launch of Odyssey Editions. The initiative has been set up to sell ebook editions of modern classics — including Lolita, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Updike's Rabbit tetralogy — exclusively via Amazon's Kindle store.

The move provoked Random House, which publishes in print several of the authors involved with Odyssey Editions, to fire off a letter to Amazon “disputing their rights to legally sell these titles”, which it said were “subject to active Random House publishing agreements”.

It went further, threatening that “on a worldwide basis”, it “will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved”.

It said the agency's decision to sell ebooks exclusively to Amazon “undermines our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors, and it establishes this agency as our direct competitor.”

A Random House spokesman, Stuart Applebaum, said severing of relations with Wylie would relate only to new book deals. Titles in the pipeline would go ahead. He accepted there was a risk for Random House, but argued that the stakes were higher for Wylie and his authors who would potentially lose a lucrative outlet for their work.

“It is not a decision that Random House reached lightly, but one that is unanimously agreed by our senior publishing colleagues in the US, Canada and the UK,” Applebaum said.

— The Guardian, London