The folks over at Amazon must be feeling rather smug at the moment, as it turns out the online retailing giant managed to score a rather interesting book deal to fend off the increasingly tight competition with Apple and Barnes & Noble on the eBook scene. According to the deal, Amazon has bypassed publishers entirely and agreed a deal with agent Andrew Wylie to exclusively publish books online by the famous authors that he has represented. The agreement gives the Kindle store sole eBook rights to authors such as the late Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, and 17 other writers. This deal might turn out to be rather controversial in the end, though, as Random House, which normally publishes some of the authors, is already challenging Amazon’s rights to publish the books online in this special deal without its consent. The publisher has already decided not to buy any further rights to English versions of Wylie-represented books until something is worked out. Sounds like a rather tricky situation, and we’ll have to see how everything works out in the long run.