What to Include in a Book's Copyright Page

Ethan Risso reports:

"To have legal protection for your book, you must provide three things on your copyright page, even if you include nothing else. 1. Identity of the copyright owner: either the name of the author or, in the case of traditional publishing, the name of the publishing house who owns the rights. 2. The copyright symbol: ©...the abbreviation Copr. or the word Copyright. Although not required, copyright owners often include both the word “Copyright” and the symbol. 3. The year the work was first published. Some new authors make the mistake of including the range of years in which they wrote the manuscript...Following the copyright notice, standard practice dictates an inclusion of the reservation of rights. A simple, common line of All Rights Reserved is often written purely out of a sense of tradition...After the rights are conveyed comes the publishing data including the publishing house’s address and any trademarks which may be in the book. Generally, a statement about environmental friendliness and the location of printing is included just below the publisher’s address...You may have also noticed a seemingly-random string of numbers on a copyright page. Used by the publication department, the ones on the left are indicators of the years and those on the right indicate the number of printings the book has gone through...If a new printing is needed, the plates for the book do not need to be remade. One digit is removed from each series of numbers, effectively updating the notice. Therefore, you would never see a book listed as a first edition without the group on the right ending with a one. As printing moves more to digital printing processes, this practice largely fades into antiquity...[The ISBN] is an internationally recognized identification number assigned to each variant of a book...[The LCCN is a] serial number assigned to the book’s bibliographic record using the cataloging system developed by the US Library of Congress...[T]he PCN is mutually exclusive from the LCCN, as it is assigned to books most likely to be acquired by the Library of Congress...Prepared before publication by the national library in the book’s native country, [the CIP] is a basic cataloging system used by many libraries and academic institutions...[A]uthors and publishers may choose to include credits for those who have had a hand in the publication of the book. If there is not enough room on the copyright page, or as a stylistic choice, the credits section is included in the book’s colophon in the end matter. When it is time for you to create your own copyright page, remember to only use the elements of the page you need."