I own quite a few international edition books: two algorithms books (Cormen and Tardos), an AI book (Russell), a stats book and a stats book. They're all pretty ugly, with the exceptions of Cormen and Russell. The "Eastern Economy Edition" books tend to not be so bad. They're paperback, but they still have the same cover images and everything. The pages tend to be really thin, but man are they cheap. I saved over $200 getting them as opposed to shopping at the university bookstore.