Authors Can Quickly Fix Errors With Ebooks But Potential for Overdoing It Exists

Posted on May 11, 2010

A post on the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog says authors can update electronic versions of books for Amazon.com's Kindle. Readers who have purchased the book receive a note that the book has been updated. F. Paul Wilson, author of An Enemy of the State, calls the update capability a "thing of beauty."

In the case of his book "An Enemy of the State," an error occurred in the process of converting his book to Kindle format-the process inadvertently dropped the last three chapers before the epilogue. Readers complained to Amazon, and so it contacted Wilson to fix the Kindle version of his book.
"I've had goofs in my hardcovers in the past, but we were never able to fix them until the next printing or edition, and no way to get the changes to people who had already bought the book," says Wilson. This gaffe was fixed in a matter of days, he says.

The positive aspect of digital corrections is that factual errors in books can be easily and rapidly fixed. Digital corrections could be a negative if authors tinker constantly with their novels and readers keep receiving notes that a novel has been updated. The Christian Science Monitor writes that the digital updates could lead to a "doomsday scenario" where a "a great work of literature is tinkered and noodled to death."