This is why I never pre-order collections, especially from Marvel.

All depends on where it's printed. If its printed outside the US or outside North America and being transported by ship, there are huge variables when it will actually arrive and be available to ship to distributors. When I was freelancing in the rpg industry, one of the publishers I worked with printed in Asia, and there was a 3-6 month window from the time it finished printing to when it arrived in their hands due to the variables with things like transport times, customs, etc. There are always a number of factors out of the hands of the actual publishers that affect turnaround times between the time they send the product off to be produced and receive the finished product back in their hands. Especially in the post-pandemic era of labor shortages, transportation delays, production and material shortages due to the earlier pandemic shutdowns, etc. it's a feat if products even come close to their initial projected release dates, so yes, it is especially difficult in this day and age to know exactly when something is going to come out. Delays are the norm now, not the exception.

-M

Yes, but if the book has the same on sale or release date everywhere, and there is a delay in one region, they will hold it back everywhere so it goes on sale everywhere at once. So even though the copies you get may be printed in the UK and shipped to Europe, a delay in copies printed elsewhere is going to affect the release date of those books. as would labor shortages at the printing plants, delays because the printers are overbooked with a surge of products being rushed to print in the post-pandemic era, paper supply shortages or issues affecting the production of all printed materials everywhere, shipping of those paper supplies to the printing plants to keep production going etc. There are literally thousands of variables that all have to go right for a company to hit those projected dates, and in normal circumstances that happens far more often than not, but these are not normal circumstances for any area of industrial production these days, and even one of those thousands of variables falling the wrong way can create significant delays in the release of a product. Printing the book in the UK and shipping it to Europe is at the end of that long chain of variables, there's a lot that could go wrong long before it gets to that point and none of those variables are known when they have to create an estimated release date to solicit those books several months in advance to even begin to account for them in those estimated dates. And Amazon has literally millions of products listed and have no where near the level of staffing to check and update release dates on all those products on any kind of regular basis if any of those variables do fall wrong, especially ones that are moving as few units as a comic book collected edition does.

But sure, it's not difficult to do...

-M

If you have say 500,000 products listed as preorders, and 117 of them have delays, each of a different initial release date and a different new release date, how is one going to automate that when they all come from different manufacturers, have different estimated release dates, different new release dates, some of which might have price changes, some not, etc. etc. I am sure there is automation to list them initially, and automation to switch a product from pre-order to available when it is actually released. But the time in between where each product has unique potential changes, you will spend as much time trying to code an automation as you would manually checking each one, as you will have to update the code with each delay. Even if they have some kind of software in place that can flag books that miss their initial estimated release date, the changes needed are unique to each product, so how would they automate that? And if those needed changes occur before the initial release date passes, your automation isn't going to have a common trigger to flag things to make automation easier and quicker than updating manually. Those updates likely aren't happening because there is no software system that actually works to manage all those variables efficiently. If there was, and it was cost-efficient, it would likely be in place.

-M