How did I get a used book from 2005?

Factual Questions
1

I’m taking a statistics class this semester. I ordered the text through the university bookstore. It is obviously a used book – not just the USED sticker, but it has the wear and tear of a book that had been toted around by a student.

I look inside and see inside C 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. Note that as of this writing it is only 1/16/05.

Maybe there’s something I don’t understand about copyrighting. Doesn’t the copyright concur with the date of original printing? Amazon lists the book as being published March 5, 2004. Amazon link to book.

[aside]I looked at the copywrite because of the cover of the book. Note this book is called Statistics for Business and Economics. What does it have on the cover? Charts? Bell curves? Paredo charts? Nope. A dude doing a flip on a snowboard. Underneath this picture are pics of guys playing basketball, a guy waterskiing, a tennis player hitting a serve, a mountain biker charging through a puddle, and a kiyaker. Yeah! Xtreme Statistics! [/aside]

2

Not really. But it is sort of an industry “secret”.

I work for a textbook publisher. We’re now writing books that will have 2006, 2007, or 2008 © dates. Most school districts want The Very Latest books - indeed, some states require that kids not have books more than X years old in some subjects. But of course it takes a while to write a book and have it approved for use in a given district or university class or whatever, so the © date is usually assigned according to when the book is expected be on kids’ desks. If Pearson got your stats book done faster than expected, it’s entirely possible they started selling it a little early.

Also, you may have a not-intended-for-sale “first printing” copy that may have a handful more errors than the official second or third printings will have. Textbook publishers often print ridiculously small first print runs, KNOWING that we’ll find mistakes to be corrected in later printings.

Actually, we now start working on “reprints” before the first printing is actually printed…

It used to be that we expected the development of a new book or a major new edition of a book to take about three years. Now, if we can’t do it in less than half that, we can’t compete. So more and more lil’ errors have to wait to be fixed until after the thing is proved to be marketable. These aren’t generally serious content errors, by the way, but things like a page reference that’s one page off, or a table-of-contents entry that got the exact title of a section slightly wrong, or a comma missing that doesn’t affect anyone’s understanding of the passage but doesn’t follow our style guidelines.