Short answers, pulled from the story.
Introducing... The Beatles was released on the 10th of January, 1964, on Vee-Jay Records. It came out ten days before Capitol's Meet the Beatles!, though Capitol's album entered the US album chart one week ahead of it.
The album was originally scheduled for a July 1963 release, but a management crisis at Vee-Jay Records halted it. The label's president, Ewart Abner, resigned after using company money to cover personal gambling debts, and the release was cancelled. Vee-Jay did not move forward until January 1964, when the band's sudden US popularity made the unreleased recordings valuable.
Version one, released on the 10th of January, 1964, included "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You", but Beechwood Music, Inc., Capitol's publishing subsidiary, obtained a restraining order on the 16th of January because it owned the American publishing rights to those songs and had not licensed them. Vee-Jay removed the two tracks and replaced them with "Ask Me Why" and "Please Please Me", creating version two, which began appearing in stores around the 10th of February, 1964.
The album sold approximately 1,300,000 mono copies and approximately 41,000 stereo copies before Vee-Jay's license expired on the 15th of October, 1964. On the 24th of July, 2014, the RIAA certified it gold and platinum.
Stereo pressings account for only 3.1 percent of all copies manufactured. Of the roughly 80,000 copies released before the initial restraining order, only around 2,000 were in stereo. Because legitimate stereo copies are so scarce, nearly any copy with "stereo" or "stereophonic" printed on the cover is a counterfeit.
Common counterfeit indicators include labels with the title and band name split by the center spindle hole, off-center color bands or missing green color, large white brackets instead of a proper color band, dark brown album cover borders, and hype stickers reading "P.S. I Love You" instead of "Please, Please Me". On copies from the late 1970s onward, George Harrison's shadow is absent from the right side of the cover, while it is visible on virtually all authentic pressings.