I am a bit upset. I finally revised my Codeword Dictionary into a second edition and have been able to format it for Kindle all by myself. So I sent it in to Amazon.
They want proof I own the copyright. When I published the dead-tree edition (c. 1998) the publisher sent me some sort of certificate. I have asked my wife to look through my stuff in the US. She may find it.
But I am upset, what if it has been lost in all the moves? How can I get some sort of proof?
The publisher was bought up a couple of times and they make it hard to contact them. As I said, a bit upsetting.
Copyright is automatic. That certificate merely indicates that you’ve registered the copyright with the Copyright Office, which is not necessary to own a copyright. The certificate doesn’t prove you own a copyright, merely that you’ve told the copyright office that you do.
I’m surprised Amazon would require authors to register their copyrights before publishing. In my experience, when publishers ask for something along those lines, they really just want an assertion by you that you own the rights to the material they will be reproducing. A letter stating that is usually sufficient.
I guess it’s possible Amazon requires authors to register their copyrighted material first, though I can’t see why they’d do so, and their Kindle Copyright Guidelines page makes no mention of such an odd requirement. If I were you, I’d send them a letter asserting that you own the copyright on the material, and see if that’s enough for them.
I don’t see how the certificate proves anything to Amazon. So you can prove you have a copyright for the book “Codeword Dictionary”. What’s to stop you from taking a copy of “The Name of the Rose”, changing the title to “Codeword Dictionary”, and sending it to Amazon? Does the certificate say anything in detail about the content of the book?
Thank you all. The first step is to see if I can find the old one, the next step might be to pay for a new one. All in all, the new requirement sort of spoiled my moment.