Hook becomes a (self) published author.

So, here is the weird story.

On the Kindle paperwhite, the covers are automagically updated without my doing anything.

But on my android phone, the only thing that worked was to clear data on the Kindle app, forcing it to reread your entire library when you log back in. FFS, what a stupid idea. You will lose any bookmark, etc. Maybe I missed something, but I tried everything.

Deleting from content and devices does *not* work. You will have to repurchase the book and if that data has not been cleared in the app, it will *still* show the same cover. WTF? I tried on two android devices. Same results. Why the apps (with autosync and autoupdates turned on) can't do exactly what the Kindle paperwhite does automagically is beyond me.

Sorry folks.

 

Hook, is there some actual human being at Amazon you can talk to about this? Some books I've purchased have had their covers automatically updated without my intervention. I do keep automatic updates enabled on the Android Kindle app on my LG G6. This is my Tom Clancy collection:



Four of the books had their covers updated maybe a year ago, I don't really remember when, but it was when Amazon Prime released a Jack Ryan series (which I don't ever intend to watch ) . You can see the series protagonist in the 4 new covers. I didn't do anything other than keep automatic updates enabled, and Amazon redownloaded the books with the new covers without any further input from me. I actually preferred the older covers, but I guess this is what happens when one yields to the almighty corporations. In any case, this means there is a way to force new content on an already purchased ebook, without requiring purchasing again.

Hope you can get this sorted out, Hook.

 

Will investigate further...

 

To answer your question, no, as far as I can tell, no humans I can reach out to directly. I have been through the knowledge bases for kindle and those in the author's portal and found nothing on point. The author's portal does provide an email form for asking questions, so I sent of an inquiry last night and have not heard from them yet. We'll see if this gets me a real person or a canned answer.

I'll keep you posted.

I'm very frustrated. This should not be this hard.

 

I guess I could always use Calibre to edit the books, change the covers then send them to my Kindle app. Maybe Hook can be persuaded to send us autographed covers in hi-res jpg format then we'd have our special, limited edition.

 

I like John Krasinski; but I'm not a fan of putting his face on the old titles.

 

So here is the answer I got from Amazon (not sure from what geographic location) almost 24 hours later:

Okay, I didn't try logging out and logging back in. It's possible that is less drastic than clearing data, but if it works I'm thinking it might be. I do know that, before I cleared data, I tried removing the book from my phone and then redownloaded it. when I did that, it showed up with the old cover, but when I opened the book and went to the beginning of the file, it had the new cover. Of course when the CS person downloaded the books for the first time, he got the right covers-- somehow it's as if the Kindle app caches the covers and unless data is wiped the covers in cache always win (and yes, I tried just wiping cache on the app and that made no difference).

As I said before, it shouldn't be that hard. You can get updates of the content, but something is broken about updating covers on the Kindle Android App that isn't broken on the Kindle Paperwhite.

Oh well. My apologies again folks.