Let’s Talk Bookish: Special Editions

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022, with Dini at Dini Panda Reads as co-host from February 2025.

Let’s Talk Bookish 14th November:
Are “Special Editions” still special?

Prompts: With the amount of ‘special’, ‘limited’, or ‘collectors’ editions that have saturated the market (including special limited ARCs), do you still consider special editions to be special? Do you buy special editions? If so, what makes you want to buy one  (i.e. sprayed edges, foiling, character art, etc.)? Give us the tea— what books do you think have too many special editions, and what books do you wish had more (or even one!) special editions?

Being upfront, I don’t typically tend to buy special editions. Not out of some moral code or values, but literally because, well, I can’t afford to! I can see the appeal, but I definitely think special editions have gone really overboard now. It used to be you’d come across a special edition of a book that was in some way meaningful – a classic, or beloved in some way. At least it felt like that to me. But now it seems like publishers will release a book, then almost immediately release a ‘special edition’, encouraging fans to collect them like sets, paying more money than they likely should for something that is, fundamentally, the same book with some slight changes.

So yes, I think they’ve saturated the market – I can’t remember the name of the book, but someone released one with different endings, or different chapters included, so to get the full story you had to purchase something like 4 – 6 books. That’s ridiculous! And social media has contributed to this – when bookish folks were mainly on text based platforms (blogs, Twitter, and sites like Goodreads) this wasn’t an issue, but with the rise of more visual mediums, everyone’s more interested in a book looking pretty than reading well.

I want to reiterate – special editions have their place, but I don’t think reissuing books in slightly different formats, or with certain edges, or different cover art is good justification for them. I honestly can’t understand people collecting special editions of the same book so they have a set, and it’s being fed by publishers who must make so much off these. I like what Folio Society do – I think special editions with, for example, illustrations to go with the book, or classics with different introductions, or just just new editions of beloved books that have been around for a few decades or have had huge success are all valuable.

I get, too, that some people like having special editions because they like something more pristine or beautiful to display, while they read and reread a beloved, maybe-little-worse-for-wear copy. But it is hard for me to understand some books that have come out in the last few years getting special editions beyond maybe a nice bonus for pre-orders. I don’t understand putting out five or six different versions of the same book, and I dislike how a certain culture has built up over special editions where…

Okay, we all have books on our TBRs we intend to read but have been there for a while because we haven’t got to them yet, and I’m not against people buying books when they have a library at home, knowing their TBR is ever growing, but ultimately, books are meant to be read. So I don’t understand having more than one special edition of a book that, because it’s so beautiful or purely for display, you never actually intend to read it.

This doesn’t just apply to books and books aren’t a cause of this, but they are a symptom – more and more, beauty is being prized over substance, and although there’s an old saying of “you can’t judge a book by its cover”, unfortunately in a more image focused world, even if the book isn’t well written or a good story or just plain falls flat, if it’s got a good cover, a special edition that can be shown off on Instagram or TikTok, then it’ll likely still sell pretty well. Unfortunately this means books without all that extra marketing money thrown at them – books that could actually be pretty damn good – are getting squeezed out and ignored, simply because they don’t make for the perfect social media image or video.