I've had people ask me "why do publishers put future dates in their books?" I just ran into this with the SOAP book, so I'll explain.
The book is going to be Copyright (C) 2002, even though it's being published in December 2001. The reason for this is to prevent it from looking misleadingly out of date. If it says 2001, then in January 2002 it's going to look "a year out of date" to most casual readers.
So we say 2002 for books published in the dying months of 2001, to prevent premature expiration. It makes sense in a twisted marketing way :-)
--Nat
