The book was a companion to A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Southeast Asia which was published the previous year, in 2000.

By 2012 a lot of new information and photographic material on the birds of Indonesia had emerged, and work on a second edition was started.

In the second edition, new photographers such as James Eaton, Robert Hutchinson, Pete Morris and Bram Demeulemeester are the main contributors of new, rare and endemic species.

The second edition was expanded from 416 to 544 pages and now weighs 780 grams and illustrates 912 species, out of which 213 are endemic (found only in Indonesia).

An additional 37 photos were replaced with new and better ones; a misidentified bird (the Flores hawk-eagle) was renamed, and another species (Sumatran laughingthrush) was split out as endemic following the latest taxonomy.

Threat status and icons for all globally threatened species were revised, and the annotations in the checklist were updated for each subregion using the latest information available.

In this reprint, two photographs were replaced and all nomenclature, taxonomy, distribution data and global threat status was updated throughout the book.

Following numerous taxonomic splits and new national bird records, the updated complete checklist then covered 1,634 species; 406 of those are endemic to Indonesia and 317 are threatened with global extinction, near-threatened or data deficient.