I discovered something fascinating about Amazons “Auto-Update” feature for ebooks: it doesn’t work. 

After researching, it seems it hasn’t been working for a few years. So when authors update their books, the reader has to log into the website and update them manually. 

As someone who reads almost exclusively indie authors, I am frustrated by this development. All of the authors I know update their books many times during the first few weeks after releasing, meaning many of those updates go unseen by those who bought it. 

This also spans over into traditionally published books, when scrolling through my Kindle Library I noticed many of my trad books also had updates waiting.

Hopefully this helps you as much as it helped me! 

Written Instructions

You will have to log into the website to do this.

Once you are in your account, click on Your Account and Lists, to get the full menu of account options.

Then find “Your Content and Devices“.
This will give you a full list of all the ebooks you own.

There is no way to sort by those that need updates, so you can scroll through, or search by title to check.

If a book needs an update it will have blue words that state “Update Available“

Visual Instructions

Step One

Step Two

Step Three