issue / publication

Hello everyone !

is there a difference in meaning between "date of publication" and "date of issue" when talking about a book?

Thanks a lot !

I have never heard "date of issue" in the U.S.

See publish in the dictionary attached to this forum.

I have seen "date of issue" used with things like stamps, coins, tickets, etc which are not exactly "published". I suppose a book might also be considered issued as well as published. I don't think there would be any difference, but we'd have to see the context in which you found the term to be able to help you any further.

In the book-publishing business, at least in the US, "date of publication" has a specific meaning: It means the date (usually given as a month and year) when the book is available for purchase.

"Date of issue" is not used in book publishing, but it is used in magazine and journal publishing and refers to whatever appears on the cover of the particular issue. That may be a specific date for a weekly (January 16, 2012, for example) or a month or months (January 2012, or January-February 2012).

There can be a difference between the date of publication and the copyright date. Books that are published late in a calendar year often carry a copyright date of the following year. I work with university-level textbooks, where a recent copyright date helps create the impression that a book is current: a book with a 2011 copyright will be adopted more readily for a 2012 course than one with a 2010 copyright, even if they were both published on the same day.

(There may be an official cutoff date for this practice, before which you are not allowed to copyright a book in the following year, but if there is, I don't know what that date is.)

The copyright date of a published work is simply a year, and none of my books carry copyright dates that differ from the year of publication (but none of my books have been published in December, and none have been textbooks).

One example that comes to mind is Information Systems for Managers: Text and Cases by Gabe Piccoli. Amazon.com (on this page) gives the publication date of the first edition as Nov. 16, 2007, but the book (as can be confirmed via Look Inside on the same page) is © 2008. I use the second edition now, and I don't know if it has this difference, but the first did. I have no idea how common this practice is, but I've noticed it in more than this one case.