Books A/V Solo: A Star Wars Story The Official Guide Hardcover – May 25, 2018

I may be mistaken, but I imagine that it's a deliberate choice on the part of the publishers to denote that these are different kinds of sourcebooks. Typically, the films in the ST have both a Visual Dictionary and an Incredible Cross-Sections, with a clear line of demarcation between the kinds of information you'd expect to find in each. By contrast, the anthology films only have the one guide, which combines elements of the VD and ICS into a single sourcebook - hence a different name to distinguish the different styles.

I'm not sure if @DarthInternous is involved in editing the sourcebooks, but over in the publishing thread, he's mentioned some of the editorial decisions behind the titles of various novels. Perhaps he can help shed some more insight into the matter and tell me if I'm on the right track.

Noash is right. Since these books usually come out on the same day/just slightly before the film (and tend to leak even earlier than that), they usually avoid filling them with spoilers/surprises they might want to keep under wraps. The guide for Rogue One, for instance, didn't give any hints that Tarkin was going to appear, or any of the other surprise cameos from ANH.

 

Nope, the sourcebooks, art books, visual guides are all published by other publishers: DK, Abrams, Chronicle, etc. I'm not sure what the strategy there is, and the naming conventions. Sorry.

 

There were Evazan & Ponda hints at least - the Decraniated, the persons reportedly responsible being "Roofoo" and "Sawkee" which were Evazan and Ponda's names in the ANH radio drama.

 

And General Romodi was in there.

Good grief. Romodi was in Rogue One. With lines!

 

That's the only bummer about these guides, which are generally pretty awesome. They're fun to leaf through right after the film comes out, but I'll tend to take a deeper dive a little later, and at that point I find a lot of great, great stuff that's already popping up elsewhere in canon, and at the same time big gaps in information that's become a big part of what I think about when revisiting the film. I haven't gotten the SOLO guide yet; I know I'll enjoy it a lot but I'll miss not just the Maul info but what might have made it in there about Enfys Nest and her crew if it'd come out later than it did.