[Coder]

The UK-split is simply the same version as the US-one but split in half.. no "new" storylines or anything..

Here's from his own FAQ:

Q: Your novels are broken up into several parts in my country, and published in multiple volumes. Why do you do that?

A: I don't. My publishers do. In France, in Italy, in Germany, in the Czech Republic, in Korea, in China, in Japan, and in several other countries, the novels have been published as two (or in some cases, three or four) books. My understanding is that this is largely a matter of economics. These are long novels even in English, and in many cases the process of translation can actually make a book longer. And each publisher presumably knows his own market, and what the readers will and will not accept in terms of book length and book price. Even some of the publishers who would prefer to issue each novel in a single volume -- my British, Dutch, and Hebrew publishers, for instance -- found themselves unable to do so in the case of A STORM OF SWORDS, where the sheer size of the book would have made it prohibitively expensive to produce, for their markets. I know it must be annoying to have the story broken up into two or three or four parts, but in some countries the choice is either that, or no edition at all. At least I am in good company. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS was written as a single long novel, too. It was his publisher who decided to issue it as a trilogy, purely for commercial reasons.