Whenever I crack open a new book, I start by reading the book’s copyright page. I want to know when a book was first published, as this immediately moderates my expectations. For example, I recently read Fourty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt, which was copyrighted by Giles Blunt in the year of 2000, and first published in Great Britain in 2001. At that time, fax machines were still widely used, as were answering machines, and social media platforms did not yet exist.
With the exception of certain genres, e.g., historical novels, technology generally influences a story’s plot development. How fast can a person get from A to B? How quickly can a person be reached (by phone, fax, E-mail, etc.)? Can a person be traced? If I know when a book was written, it moderates my expectations as a reader.
So, I always start by reading a book’s copyright page; and I’ve noticed something that confounds me: Publishing houses use the ©-symbol in very different ways. Is there a right way to use the copyright smbol? A wrong way? I know that copyright legislation differs from country to country, and that the use of the ©-symbol matters less in certain countries, e.g., in Austria, where I live, than in other jurisdictions.
In Austria, §10 UrhG assigns the copyright to the person who created the work, the author of a book. However, should there ever be a legal dispute, the use of the ©-symbol is assigned evidentiary value during court proceedings, based on §12 Abs.1 UrhG, which assigns presumption of authorship to the person who gets to use the symbol. If the author isn’t clearly identified in the book as such, by use of the ©-symbol, the burden of proof would fall upon them.
Let me list four examples from books published by German and British publishing houses, which demonstrate how publishing houses communicate copyright information to readers. The copyright notices are all somewhat different, but in three of the four books, the authors are identified as the copyright owners of the books which were written by them.
The authors subsequently assigned the licensing rights to publishing houses, and some publishing houses use the ©-symbol to communicate the fact that they hold the licensing rights. That’s why you’ll sometimes find the ©-symbol used twice on a copyright page, by both a book’s author, and the book’s publishing company. One such example would be Beate Maxian’s book, Tod auf der Donau (scroll down for more information).
Sometimes, only the publishing houses are listed with a ©-symbol on a book’s copyright page. Or worse: Florian Illies’s name – author of Liebe in Zeiten des Hasses – was completely omitted from the copyright page. How strange is that?
Illies’s publishing house holds the licensing rights for his book, and uses the ©-symbol to communicate those rights to the readers. But that doesn’t change the fact that Florian Illies wrote the book, and I consider it bad practice by a publishing house to omit an author’s name from the copyright page. In my opinion, authors’ names should always be listed on the copyright page, right next to a big, fat ©-symbol.
These are the copyright notices of the four books which I am using as examples to illustrate my point:
Florian Illies, Liebe in Zeiten des Hasses: © 2021 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH; Erschienen bei FISCHER Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main, Mai 2023; 4. Auflage 2025. (This book contains several quotes from three other books, and copyright information for these books is also listed; the ©-symbol is assigned to the publishing houses/licenced copyright holders. Mascha Kaléko, who wrote two of the books quoted in Liebe in Zeiten des Hasses, and who died in 1975, isn’t named on the copyright page.)
Giles Blunt, Fourty Words for Sorrow: Copyright © Giles Blunt 2000; First published in Great Britain in 2001 by HarperCollins; This paperback edition 2002.
Beate Maxian, Tod auf der Donau: Copyright © 2025 by Beate Maxian; Originalausgabe April 2025; 2. Auflage, Copyright © dieser Ausgabe by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, München, in der Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH.
Lindsey Davis, There Will Be Bodies: Copyright © Lindsey Davis 2025. First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton Limited. An Hachette UK company. This paperback edition published in 2025.
Conclusion: Authors should always insist on being listed on a book’s copyright page with the ©-symbol printed right next to their name.