Kindle DX: What's the scoop on book updates?

[wornways]

What happens if an author updates a book that you've purchased to a new revision after the fact? I'm noticing that there are a lot of books that are not well put together, but that some of them get updated periodically with a better formatted version. Are you able to download the updated copy without having to repurchase the book (Hasn't yet happened with a book I currently have).

[CWatkinsNash]

Amazon sends you an email telling you that the ebook has been updated, and you have to reply with "yes" if you want the update. The reason for this is that any notes and such will not be transferred to the new book, so they don't do the update automatically. When they get a "yes" reply, they update the book in your archive and whichever (if any) device you have it on at the time.

[avantman42]

I talked to a CS person on the phone about this earlier today, because I've got a couple of books that have been updated (I'd e-mailed the authors with errors, and they told me they'd fixed them), but the ones in my archive weren't the updated versions.

Apparently they get updates all the time, most of which are minor, so they only e-mail people if the updates are major ones (the example he gave was if missing pages had been added). Otherwise, customers would get annoyed at the mass of "this ebook has been updated" they'd receive.

If you know that a given book has been updated, you can e-mail them and ask them to update your copy.

[wornways]

Great responses. Informative. Thank you very much people.