Michelle Sagara

You occasionally get some British paperbacks that have to be stripped, though when I used to help out in an SF bookshop I used to refuse to be the one who actually physically did it, on the grounds that I couldn't bear to hear the books scream. It depends on the publisher and the distributor. You're right that most British books of any format are returnable as whole books, but there are exceptions. (Who was publishing Raymond E. Feist in Britain in the 1990s? That's the only one I can positively remember required stripping.)