For years, Taylor Swift was one of the music industry’s leading crusaders against the profit-sucking specter known as streaming, with Swift famously holding out on bringing her library to anything but the pricey Apple Music until 2017 (and on the same day as the release of a new Katy Perry album, as this was back when they were feuding). Last year, when she left her longtime label Big Machine for Universal Music Group’s Republic Records, her contract even included a clause about the label having to give money back to its artists if it ever sold its stake in Spotify.
Now, one of the literary world’s biggest holdouts against digital media has pulled a Taylor Swift-like reversal (albeit one that comes nine years after his death), with The New York Times reporting that J.D. Salinger’s stories will soon be available as e-books for the first time ever. On Tuesday, you’ll finally be able to read The Catcher In The Rye, Nine Stories, Franny And Zooey, and Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters And Seymour: An Introduction on your phone or e-book machine. Matt Salinger, the author’s son, has rejected approving this move for far longer than some of literature’s other big holdouts, at least partially because he knew that his father wouldn’t have wanted it. Still, he told The New York Times that had recently been seeing more and more indications that he should be open to ebooks, like a woman telling him that she had a disability that made reading printed books difficult and having a realization on a trip to China that the young people who should be Catcher In The Rye’s primary audience exclusively read things on their phones.