A lot of textbooks on Amazon are available at significantly lower prices from other dealers who are listed on the Amazon page. Every now and then one of the non-amazon dealers will have “U.S. Edition” listed in their book description. Does this mean that most of the others are International editions and what’s different about an international edition? Is an International edition something I should avoid?
Well for a start in a UK edition, the spelling would be slightly different (though that probably depends on the title).
Perhaps they’ll refer to “elevators”
as “lifts”, pronounce the last letter of the alphabet “zed” instead of “zee”, and many other things. From what I gather, the U.S. is quite the rebel as far as foreign policy is concerned.
I am a great fan of the Maigret novels by George Simenon. When translated from the French they are available in both US and British English versions. The differences are both in the spelling ( color / colour ) and actual words ( sidewalk/ pavement ) even the book titles are changed sometimes ( Maigret and the Bum / Maigret and the Tramp ) to suite the appropiate market.
So, it seems you guys are saying it doesn’t make a lot of difference and I might as well save some money. Thanks.
All books are basically UK or US editions. The rest of the world was split up between US and UK publishers. Here in Australia books, even by US authors, are generally provided by their UK publisher. A bookshop can only order in a US edition of a book if no UK publisher has published it. The two editions will be identical.
The AAFES (military) bookstores in Germany almost exclusively sold international versions of English books. I remember reading some big, 10-book L. Rob Hubbard series and thinking to myself, what the hell is a grip?
In Mexico (US-style places like Sanborn’s), they sell U.S.-English books rather than international. BUT their problem is worse – the sell Spanish-Spanish versions of Spanish language books! Nothing like trying to read El Padrino (yeah, the Godfather) and knowing nothing about their silly 3d person plural familiar verbs that no one’s used in the new world for hundreds of years. Granted I only have three years of Spanish experience, but it really, really makes minimal the differences between U.S./U.K. English!
In my experience “International Edition” often means “paperback”.
If you look hard enough, there are also Indian editions of most technical textbooks, which are very, very cheap. For instance, www.Firstandsecond.com
I don’t know specifically about textbooks, which the OP asks about. But some of the responses are about regular trade books, and in that case you do want to be careful. Sometimes, in addition to spelling and vocabulary changes, more substantial changes are made in American editions to avoid offending American sensibilities. For instance, in Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood, a scene with a Japanese character, which might have been considered racist, was cut from the US edition. And I have heard, although I can’t substantiate it, that A.S. Byatt was asked to add a sex scene to Possession for the US edition. Given the political sensitivity of textbooks, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had similar changes (although I guess technical textbooks would be less likely to).