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I have always downloaded my Amazon book purchases immediately after buying them. So I had no urgent need to go download everything (already done, at purchase time). But I had some time today so I thought I'd go look for updates that were available. I didn't really care about this initially, but I was bored today and thought I might as well look.
I had about 3550 books. That is 142 pages of content on the Amazon website. I manually scrolled through all of those scanning for updates with my eyeballs only. Took me about one hour. Of all those books, I only found three dozen updates that I clicked to download (the rest I could immediately rule out as being not of interest). I can tell already that the vast majority of those update downloads I just did will never make it into Calibre. I clicked to download them if they sparked the briefest flicker of interest. I think on a second pass of what I downloded that I'll probably reject most everything I just did.
I noticed a couple of trends in my book collection regarding updates. Number one is, I have collected a ton of garbage books! Most of these appear to be free "purchases" that I did based on listings on websites like "freebooksy" and others of that ilk. Never heard of the author, never heard of the series, don't even recall the book title. But there it is in my collection, for whatever reason (I know that reason was because it was free!)
The second trend I noticed was that these free books tend to be the ones that have updates. Third was that specific authors, and specific series, tend to have many updates. I found a few authors that I could almost guarantee that the next book of theirs that showed up in my search would have an update. I figure these authors either make a lot of mistakes that need updating, or maybe they're just super-meticulous about polishing what they publish (doubtful, since many are the free books I have already commented on).
So based on my manual scan of my book collection at Amazon, updates are indeed something that I don't need to worry about. I wasted a hour of my life, but not a big deal - I was bored anyway.
Oh, one other trend that I noticed. My Amazon ebook purchases have dropped way down in recent years. Almost nothing recently. So not only will it not bother me that Download and Transfer is gone, I don't think it would even bother me much if Amazon takes away the "purchase" option too. I know in a previous post that I said I would not be buying books from Amazon anymore after this D&T thing. But I found that I had stopped 99% this purchasing already, regardless of D&T's status. I'm basically only reading library loans and Amazon purchases from long ago these days.
That's my story. Other's experiences will no doubt be different.
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