WHICH EDITION HAS THE BEST TEXT?
A frequently asked question is "Which edition has the most accurate and correct text?"  Currently, this would be the Houghton Mifflin 2005 one-volume paperback which contains several further emendations beyond the extensively corrected 2004 50th Anniversary edition.  For that edition the text was carefully examined by a team of scholars (see description under the entry for the deluxe 50th Anniversary edition) under the consultation of Christopher Tolkien.  Nearly 400 corrections were made to the text. The recent Houghton Mifflin trade paperbacks published in June 2005 utilize the 2004 text.

The brand new volume of annotations The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull delineates the corrections made to the 2004 text and to the 2005 text.