The Official Sonic the Hedgehog Yearbook (1993)

Release dates and PDF scan

So, I've located the book's ISBN and tried to search for information about it, but I am getting so many conflicting statements about this book:

• Amazon and AbeBooks.com claim the book was published in 1991 in their product listings.
• Sonic News Network's article has statements about the book being released in 1993, but they have no references to back their claims.
• 
  A thread about the book on the forums with speculative posts to suggest it did come out in 1993.

This is leaving me confused with what should be written for this article. Course, there's always pointing out that it's an educated guess and link back to the topic as reference, but I really don't know which is more correct.

Also, if Sonic Retro is aiming to have complete PDF scans of books and the likes, then could we use Trunks' scans from that thread I linked to here perhaps? (but that 863MB download for the 300dpi scan is quite a big oof and I don't know if the CDN can handle something that big) --BSonirachi (talk) 06:30, 27 September 2019 (EDT)

It's almost certainly a 1993 release, but it's a weird one because the news stories inside would suggest the summer of 1993, which is an odd time to release a "yearbook". I don't think we ever worked that one out.

Retro CDN could cope with a file that size but getting it up there is tricky. The standard uploader won't take it and the fancier "upload wizard" seems broken. I reported these things earlier in the week (I upload big things through FTP and that's dead for me too). -Black Squirrel (talk) 14:22, 27 September 2019 (EDT)

The photo of the Sonic balloon at the 11 April 1993 Sega European Grand Prix is the most definitive bit of evidence. Richard Elson said that he worked on the Yearbook "the year before STC was launched", so it seems that the comics and art were created many months in advance, and the Sega features were written up later in order to be more recent/relevant. On Lew Stringer's blog a few years ago, he talked about how hardback annuals used to arrive in shops in September, but were traditionally given as Christmas presents. --Pecky (talk) 11:07, 28 September 2019 (EDT)