FnordChan--the revised Gunslinger was sitting on my front porch when I got home from work, so I quickly spotchecked it against the 1988 edition, a few pages here and there. The changes I see are small, but significant.
First off, for those into book design, the revised Gunslinger has reset type and is on acid-free paper. (My copies of DT 1-4 have already gone yellow, and my Wizard and Glass isn't even ten years old. If the new Viking hardcovers are all acid-free, as I think they are, that might push me over the edge into buying them--I may not read the series again, but my kids might, if/when I have any. The Grant hardcovers of DT 5-7 don't say they're acid-free, but those books are printed on such nice stock compared to even the reissues of 1-4 that it's hard to imagine they're not.)
Anyway. There are two kinds of changes to the text I see immediately. The first is stylistic, and it touched almost every single paragraph I looked at. Here's a comparison of the openings.
1988:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
2003:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
The tone of the new Gunslinger is slightly less pretentious and high-fantasy (fewer semicolons, e.g.) and reads a bit easier.
The second change is that there are lots of additional details to the world in the new version that aren't in the old one. Again, from the opening pages, when Roland lights a fire in the desert using devil-grass:
1988:
He struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down upwind, letting the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste.
2003:
He laid the flint down the steel rod and struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass, mumbling the old and powerful nonsense words as he did: "Spark-a-dark, where's my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire." It was strange how some of childhood's words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.
He lay down upwind of his little blazon, letting the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste.
What I liked about the first edition of the Gunslinger was the minimalism of the world in which it took place--almost nothing was described in detail. Much of that is gone in the new edition (as far as I can tell), but the writing style of the new edition is more in line with the style of the later books in the DT series (from DT3 on, I'd say).
