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Umm...what?

Backlogs, over-/understock and supply chain issues.

If GW's biggest supply chain time constraint is the books, being printed and shipped en-mass from abroad, that dictates how many of a thing they can put on shelves.
GW makes the models themselves, and can create more models for a box pretty easily, compared to printing more books.
So, if you treat the Leviathan box as having two halves, the models and the books.

GW orders X books from the international printers, and they know they will arrive around a particular date.
They then book themselves some time in the model factory to make the amount of models for the first batch, to coincide with the books arriving.
Throw in an extra model-making window at pre-order time, to make more if the pre-orders go too wild.

If the pre-orders scoop up far more boxes than they made, they can make more, up to the X books they had printed and shipped. They cannot make more boxes, as they need to order more, and wait for them to arrive.
But if the per-orders hit targets, and do not go over by too many, they make that many more models, plus a few for the shelves, and have a pile of books left over.

Once the Lev boxes are all out to players, stores (and scalpers), they can sell the rest of the books off separately,
But, if they put a Leviathan cover on it at the printers, they're stuck with a pile of Leviathan books they won't sell as single-item rulebooks.

Do covers come pre-stuck (as I'd expect them to) with Standard rulebooks coming later?
Do the covers get stuck on afterwards? (I really can't see that happening, but would explain a lot of the stock issues).

Very off-topic for the OP's question, but am trying to understand GW's exploits.

Well that assumes gw plans to sell more of limited discount box never intended to flood market. That's what starter sets are for.

This is more of preview for 10e

 Skinnereal wrote:
If they printed enough books for everyone, no matter how they get it, do the Leviathan books have Leviathan covers?
Otherwise, they'll have locally made enough models for a first wave, can spin up another or two, and will sell off the spare books when the boxes have all had their models allocated.

If the Lev box and the 'normal' books are not the same, this makes no sense, and won't be the case.

They're Box specific books, and having read the descriptions closer I'm not so sure I still want my two. If its still just the CORE rules and not the CORE + Advanced Rules you've still got to buy a rule book. The thing I liked about Indomitus is not only did I want multiple sets of the models, it gave me two "freebie" ish sets of rule books one for each army.