[Manabi]

Originally Posted by jhowell

from Notifying Customers of Book Updates at Amaon:

That just brings up more questions I think:

Corrections to distracting errors. If we find only minor corrections, we won't notify customers who already own a copy by email, but we'll activate their ability to update the content through the "Manage Your Content and Devices" page on Amazon.com.

And yet both the recent e-mail and the one from 2015 were for "Typos have been corrected." Unless they misspelled every other word in the book, typos are usually minor changes (for most readers, not all) so why did those two books trigger an e-mail? (Unfortunately I had not already downloaded the book they sent a notice for, so I can't see how many typos there were.)

And then there's this part:

Some examples of corrections that don't justify sending updates to customers who previously purchased your book are:

• New Content Added: Chapter(s) or page(s) added, deleted or revised; new images added; bonus chapter added.
• Book Plot or Character Changes: Character's name changed; book ending changed.
• Marketing Information: Links or marketing info added, deleted, or modified.

New chapters or pages being added, deleted or revised seems kinda important and worthy of an update notice. Ditto for new images. Even if they aren't critical, existing owners would probably like to know there's new images and check them out. Since they cover adding chapters earlier in that sentence, bonus chapters much mean preview chapters of other books. That one makes sense to not send out a notice on.

But then the second one... Plot and character changes, book ending changed, those are all pretty damn major changes. Those kind of things would turn most books I've read into quite different books. A character's name changing is minor (usually, I can think of ways it could be a major thing too), so it seems out of place there.

The last one makes sense to not send out update notices.

So basically Amazon's own guidelines are inconsistent. They say they don't sent out notices for minor changes, but do for just typos at times. Then they list a bunch of major changes that they don't think warrants an update notice.