Europe by Rail 17th edition reprint

Have you been on the hunt for a copy of our book Europe by Rail: the Definitive Guide? We have good news for you. New stock is on the way and will be shortly be available through the European book trade.

The 17th edition of Europe by Rail was published in April 2022. The book was then reprinted in September 2022. That reprint was a longish print run and served well in supplying the book trade for the Christmas market and well into 2023. However, the book became unavailable through bookshops around Easter 2023, although Amazon (who had purchased a very large supply) retained availability through into early May 2023.

We were a little slow in ordering a reprint of this 17th edition of the book, as we were busy changing our distributor in spring this year. That’s all now sorted, and this week the first copies of the reprinted stock were shipped. It will take a couple of weeks for those to feed though into the book trade, but we are confident that the book will again be available in good bookshops and through online sales channels in the second half of July.

A reprint is not a new edition

We are often asked about the difference between a reprint and a new edition of Europe by Rail. With each new edition we make very substantial changes and also introduce new routes into the book. Entire sections are rewritten completely. Every detail throughout the entire book is meticulously checked. Indeed for the 14th edition, which was published in June 2016, pretty well the entire book was rewritten from scratch. For the 16th edition, first published in October 2019, we had a major reorganization of the routes in the book, introducing several journeys through Britain and Ireland.

Each new edition gets a new ISBN. The ISBN of the current 17th edition is 978-3-945225-03-5.

The July 2023 reprint of Europe by Rail

A reprint is a much simpler venture than doing a new edition. A reprint keeps the same ISBN. For many publishers, a book doesn’t change at all with a reprint. We are a little bolder than most. Well do we know that there’s a lot of timetable information which quickly dates in Europe by Rail. So with each reprint of an existing edition, we do make some modest updates. This is quite tricky, as we need to keep within the existing pagination and we don’t want to amend the table of contents. But our view is that there’s no point in leaving in a reference to a ferry service which we know has been withdrawn or a hotel which we know has closed. So we tinker here and there, taking care to ensure in particular that references to train services are up to date when the files for the reprint go to press.

The new stock now being delivered to the book trade is thus not a new edition. It is still the 17th edition. If you check the impressum page, you will see it reads:

• Seventeenth edition. First published in April 2022.
• Reprinted in September 2022 and in July 2023.

We hope that this second reprint of the 17th edition will ensure adequate supplies for many months to come.