: Figuring out when a book was printed I've recently purchased a book from Amazon, and I was curious as to when it was printed. I looked at the copyright page, which looks like this: The

Vote Up Vote Down

The FSC (the tree logo on the left) was established in 1993, and the Mix label was developed in 1994 2004, so that physical copy had to have been printed some time after that.

It has a website (greenpenguin.co.uk), so you could research when the website was launched. Could be 2003.

Beyond that, yes, it's possible that any given physical copy has been kicking around for two decades. It had a run of so many, some were sold, some were returned to the publisher, and the publisher warehoused them. Your ability to purchase it now is called "long tail retailing." (It describes a graph with a high peak at the beginning, tapering out to a long but low "tail" of small steady sales.)

(0)