Andrew Wylie and Random House have reached a truce over the agent's bold bid to bypass the traditional publishing route and publish direct to Amazon's Kindle device.

A joint statement issued by Markus Dohle, chairman & c.e.o., Random House and Andrew Wylie, president of The Wylie Agency read:

"We are pleased to announce that The Wylie Agency and Random House have resolved our differences over the disputed Random House titles which have been included in the Odyssey Editions e-book publishing program. The titles soon will be available for sale on a non-exclusive basis through all of Random House's current e-book customers. Random House is resuming normal business relations with the Wylie Agency for English-language manuscript submissions and potential acquisitions, and we both are glad to be able to put this matter behind us."

The deal means Odyssey is left with just seven titles, and according to this piece in the Wall Street Journal, even those might be under threat.

David Shanks, chief executive of Pearson PLC's Penguin Group (USA), which originally published two of those titles, including "Junkie" by William S. Burroughs, said the publisher is in negotiations with Mr. Wylie, but declined to comment further.

So not quite the dramatic shift in power we'd been led to believe when the new imprint was announced. In fact, on the surface it looks like a humiliating climb-down for the respected agent, and the likely end for Odyssey.

But as others have indicated Wylie may not have ever really wanted to be a publisher anyway—not long term anyway. As the Literary Saloon notes: "What's really of interest is whether his play paid off: he said he was doing it for the authors -- so did he just give in to Random House or did he get some really good terms from them?"

According to Random House US spokesman Stuart Applebaum Wylie had several meetings with Dohle and that the pair were then able to strike an agreement, but the terms of that agreement have not been released: "The deal points are confidential but it is essentially consistent with the agreements we have with other authors and literary agencies for their back-list e-book rights," Applebaum told the Wall Street Journal.

If it hadn't been for the inclusion of Amazon in the original deal I would have gone with the view that Wylie's move was just a gesture to ratchet up digital royalty rates. Certainly, the selection of titles (Rushdie, Bellow, Nabokov, Amis) seemed more newsworthy than commercial, while the Odyssey Editions website looked a bit thrown-together (and certainly not up to Peter Collingridge's usual work). But I can't see Amazon going along with this ruse, especially since it used the Odyssey list prominently in the announcement of its new Kindles just one month ago.

Amazon has yet to break its silence on the losing the exclusivity around these titles, and as far as I can tell it has not yet removed the titles from sale. I bought the Odyssey Editions version of Martin Amis' London Fields on my Kindle app a couple of hours ago, and it remains available for purchase as of now. Furthermore, what will happen to those books already sold? Will Amazon repeat its dirty trick of removing them remotely from users' devices? If so it is unlikely to appreciate the bad publicity resulting from a deal it had no reason to regret.

However Amazon reacts, Odyssey looks all washed up for now.

The remaining Odyssey titles and their UK and US print publishers

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (UK print Penguin/US print publisher Penguin)
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Everyman/Penguin))
Junky by William S Burroughs (Penguin/Penguin)
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins/HarperCollins)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (HarperCollins/Picador)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks (Picador/Touchstone)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin/Back Bay Books)