Nice to see there isn’t as much disagreement as it seemed.
I understand what you’re trying to do, but this would really work better with multiple dates. Otherwise, all dates but the last would be lost. And, besides, we don’t generally know the date of the last reprint, just the one we currently have (often not even that). Especially with MB’s precedence, I think it just makes more sense to allow multiple dates.
Germans sure are very particular about an awful lot of things, aren’t they? 
But eventually we should have documentation pages for each language/country. We have that in MB, and with books this kind of thing is probably more common.
I actually misread you as saying “The only difference between the two editions was the font and the cover” — I thought you were saying the artwork was different. I still think it should be a different edition, but it’s not as obvious…