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Comment by evanjacobs | Hacker News Reader

For me, this is the most important takeaway: "But how do you let over 24,000+ readers know there is an update available? Amazon does not give publishers access to the customers’ email addresses so you cannot get in touch with them directly."

Amazon may have disintermediated publishers in the author -> publisher -> retailer -> reader chain but there is still opportunity to remove the retailer and have a direct author -> reader relationship.

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To be honest, I don't care that there's an update available. I'm not interested in getting spam from authors of the books I buy. I buy a lot of books for Kindle, but the day Amazon lets authors spam me is the day I stop buying at Amazon.

I understand that an author's book is important to them, but most of their readers just aren't that interested. If I was really interested in new editions of the Vim tips book, I'd already be following the author online.

Seconded. Like most customers, I'd like my book purchase to be a simple one-off transaction. I load it on my kindle and then I read it and then I don't want to be bugged about it. Unless it is a reference book (which to be fair this book might be for some readers) I don't really give a hoot that there's another version.

The most I would be OK with Amazon doing is sticking a "There is an update available" link in my menu while reading. More than that is too intrusive, no matter how much the author thinks he deserves warm fuzzies for performing a good service.

Yes, that's what I'd like to see too. A simple notification that an update is available would be all that's needed.

It doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all. There could be a 'receive updates about this book' checkbox when purchasing the book.

The last thing I want is my email address in the hands of every author of every book I've ever bought. Amazon has it right. They can notify me if there's an "important" update (hard to imagine for most books); if not, leave me alone.

One way to get around this is to offer an incentive to people who've purchased your book to give you their email address, for example, a workbook; and link to the email signup landing page within the book.

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