A dispatch story by Geoffrey A. Fowler in the Wall Street Journal reports details notes:

Eagle-eyed owners of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, like Paul Biba of the site TeleRead, have taken note of messages from Amazon letting them know that an e-book they had purchased “contained some errors that have been corrected.” The notes come with an offer from Amazon to wirelessly download an updated version of the book — with the owners’ permission.

An Amazon spokesman confirms that the company does, from time to time, contact customers with updates, and they occur with both fiction and non-fiction titles.

As Fowler continues opines observes, it this seems like an advantage of digital technology over old-fashioned print dead-tree technology: “Back when books had to be printed on dead trees, authors couldn’t do anything to fix an error they found after a book had been published.”

And indeed, one writer novelist, F. Paul Wilson, praised sung sings Amazon’s praises for being able to fix a significant mistake major ass fuck-up goof in the case of his book, An Enemy of the State, when “an error occurred in the process of converting his book to Kindle format — the process inadvertently dropped the last three chapters before the epilogue.”

Brays Says Wilson, “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.”

But in a commentary for on in at the Christian Science Monitor, Matthew Shaer wonders asks if what novelist Wilson terms calls “the ability to tinker forever” is really something to write home about something to get all hot and bothered about such a good fucking idea necessarily a good thing .

“Most writers quickly learn that at some point, more noodling is only going to make a book or a blog post worse,” says Shaer. “One writer we know, for instance, writes out every one of his articles in ballpoint pen, so he isn’t distracted by the urge to go back and rejigger every single sentence. Perhaps as a result, his prose is a thing of wonder.”