Why doesn't Smashwords notify you when a purchased book gets updated?

[ficbot]

I was doing a little purge today of some books which have long languished on my TBR pile, and was about to trash one where I caught a very obvious editing mistake. I noticed some formatting was off in the copy I had, so I decided to give it one more try and download a fresh copy. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the book has been revised four times! I loaded the most recent revision and the editing mistake which had turned me off was gone.

So...why didn't Smashwords ever notify me? I have over 100 books from them. Am I supposed to manually check all of them every so often to see if any improvements have been made? How am I supposed to know that a revised copy is available if they don't tell me?

I am going to give the book another try, but I almost didn't, and I almost judged the author---unfairly, it would seem---because I assumed that the version I downloaded on the day of purchase was the finished book. Nobody had notified me that the author had posted any revisions, so this seemed perfectly reasonable...

So...how come Smashwords doesn't have an email alert option where they can notify you of any changes to a purchased book? The thought of manually verifying all of my 100+ Smashwords books just to check gives me cold sweats. Surely, it's their job to tell me if an upgrade is available to a book I already bought?

[anamardoll]

B&N doesn't send a notification either. Terribly annoying. You CAN tell if it's been updated there, too, because the rev# on the download will change.

I think Amazon sends emails. Strange that other places don't.

[AnemicOak]

Not only does Kobo not send an email, the only way to get the updated book that I know of is to notice that it's updated and request CS push the updated version to your account.

I stumbled upon the fact that some books I had with errors had been updated because when I was logged in an went to the books page it had a buy button instead of a download button. The crazy thing is the books I was wanting fixed had probably been fixed for months, but I never would have gotten the updated copies if I hadn't noticed this and said something.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by ficbot

So...how come Smashwords doesn't have an email alert option where they can notify you of any changes to a purchased book? The thought of manually verifying all of my 100+ Smashwords books just to check gives me cold sweats. Surely, it's their job to tell me if an upgrade is available to a book I already bought?

I was wondering the same thing today; the author of a book I have in my To-Read shelf (on Goodreads) sent me a message, letting me know there was an updated version of her book @ Smashwords. Without this message I would not have known there was an update

[amward]

Has anyone asked Smashwords why they don't notify you? If enough people ask maybe they will.

[rhadin]

Probably for the same reason Smashwords seems content with filters that are so broad as to be virtually meaningless. They have other things on their list to do that they consider more important than customer service.