Impossible Dreams e-book update is live

How to get it if you bought the e-book before December 1

The December 1 content update for the Impossible Dreams e-book is now available to customers who bought the e-book prior to December 1. Affected customers may also receive an email from Amazon about this.

To access the update, log into your Amazon account and then make the following selections from the Account & Lists drop-down menu: Your Account, Content & Devices, Books. You can also click this link to reach the “Manage Your Content and Devices” screen below:

Find Impossible Dreams in your list of digital books, and you should see the blue text saying, “Update Available.” Click on the words “Update Available.” Agree to the dialog that pops up, and then you will receive the update right away.

One of the other books in the screenshot was compiled by Impossible Dreams contributor Gael Johnson — Whispers From the Past features stories from the early life of Gael’s mother, Jo Hooppaw. Those stories helped me better understand my own maternal grandmother’s childhood as a pastor’s daughter in the rural Midwest during the 1930s.

Anyway, Amazon doesn’t automatically push to customers every update that an e-book publisher uploads, but the publisher can request it, and Amazon will approve the request if the corrected errors are serious enough. They won’t do it for just any little typo.

I was able to get the request approved by reporting a factual error that my mom caught while reading the proof copy. In my essay “The Next Mrs. Rod Dreher,” I wrote in the original upload, “Our job as astrologers is to understand the whole world, so it's not wrong for astrologers to engage with the influence of Christianity, which has been a major force for the past two centuries.” Of course, I meant to say that Christianity has been a major force for the past two thousand years, and that correction was made in the December 1 update.

Another big part of the December 1 update specific to e-book users is improved consistency in hyperlinks to external sources. That’s one advantage e-book users have over print book readers — for instance, if you’re reading “The Next Mrs. Rod Dreher,” and you want to see for yourself one of the Rod Dreher blog posts I’m responding to, you can click on the footnote, and it will take you to a clickable link to an archived version of his blog post.

People who buy the e-book today will get the current version automatically, but be sure to download the update if you have the older version!