The Book Copyright Page, Explained

A copyright page is the short block of legal and edition details on the reverse of a book's title page: the copyright notice, the publisher, the edition and ISBN, and any mentions the country of publication requires. What actually belongs there depends on where you publish.

Pick the market you are publishing into for a free generator and a sourced guide to what is required, what is optional, and how print-on-demand changes things.

United States Nothing is required on the page itself. The copyright notice is optional, though printing one removes an infringer's innocent-infringement defense, and distributing in the US brings a duty to deposit copies with the Copyright Office. Full guide + free generator Germany The state press laws require an Impressum on print books: the publisher or author's name and postal address, and the printer's. Print-on-demand covers the printer line and the EU product safety details for you. Full guide + free generator France A book published or printed in France owes a list of mentions obligatoires: the éditeur's name and address, the dépôt légal month and year, the ISBN, the price in euros, and the achevé d'imprimer. Full guide + free generator Spain Only the depósito legal number, and only if you publish from Spain: printing from abroad leaves you outside the deposit duty entirely. The ISBN is voluntary, and everything else on the page is convention. Full guide + free generator Poland Nothing at all: Poland has no imprint law for books, so the strona redakcyjna is pure convention. Its quirk is that the copyright lines for the Polish edition are written in English. Full guide + free generator

Two things are worth knowing before you pick a market. Legal deposit, the duty to send copies to a national library, is a delivery rather than anything printed in the book, and it usually only reaches publishers based in the country. And since December 2024 the EU product safety rules (GPSR) ask print books sold in the EU to carry a contact address, which Amazon KDP and IngramSpark already handle on your behalf as the manufacturer of the copies they print.

Each guide covers both for its market, alongside the ISBN rules and the print-on-demand traps. None of it is legal advice.