An edition date identifies a particular publication of a work. It need not identify when the story first appeared or when a later adaptation was produced.
Work, edition and format
A work can pass through several publication events. A paperback printing produces a physical edition. An ebook release distributes a digital edition. A dramatized recording introduces additional performance and production work. Each event needs its own date.
War Against the Mafia first appeared in 1969. The original Executioner novels received an announced ebook release in December 2014, followed by print editions of the first three in October 2016. Those later events do not move the story’s origin into the twenty-first century.
Total War’s audio product distinguishes its 1981 copyright from a December 2007 release. The two dates coexist because they identify different layers of the product’s history.
Dates without false precision
A copyright year is not automatically a precise publication day. A printing statement is not automatically the first edition. A catalogue’s date field is evidence about the item it describes, with the cataloguer’s interpretation included.
The Seikei catalogue assigns different copyright years, 1981 and 1982, to two Operation Skyhook holdings. That discrepancy remains a question about those records and copies. Selecting one year without inspecting the relevant evidence would manufacture agreement.
Recording the event
A usable bibliographic statement specifies the title, format, publisher or imprint, event and date. What changes across editions is the publication object; whether the text also changed is a separate question.
An adaptation announcement adds another boundary. An announced project can have a date without producing a released work. Publication history records completed releases and proposed projects as different events.