John said:
It is not the same cover. The picture takes up the whole cover on the
third edition, but less than half of the cover on the special edition
which has a predominantly white background. They look very different.
I didn't mention the special edition, I mentioned the "3rd edition",
which, in different printings, has different contents and identical
covers, including the words "3rd edition".
This is a seriously silly (and incomprehensible) thing for a publisher
to do, because we can't write the edition description on a book list and
be sure students will get the right version; we have to add a big verbal
description on how to tell the two apart, which can be trying when you
have computerised book forms and so on that were designed on the
assumption that some short phrase would be sufficient to identify a
specific version of a book.