I bought a new medical text, published in June or July. I was surprised to find it (C)2027. How does that work?
I don’t know either, but I’ve also seen that sort of thing before. Also for a textbook, IIRC.
I’m a textbook author and yes, that’s common. The publishers want to have as late a publication date on the book as they can get away with, to make it look newer for longer. Mine tend to be available in the fall, dated the following year, with the expectation that it will be adopted by schools to start using the following fall (which will be the same year as the copyright date).
The practice dates back to the old days when you couldn’t guarantee when the publication date would be. So the copyright office lets you post-date the copyright notice (but not the copyright term itself) up to a year. As mentioned above, it’s mostly used these days to make the book seem newer for longer.
Standard practice, if there is such a thing, uses a Fall cut-off of September or October, but if you wanted to post-date to 2028 a book published in February of 2027, you probably could.
The copyright date inside a book doesn’t always correspond to the actual copyright registration date, which is normally what it refers to.
Back in the day the publication date normally followed registration by about a month. When I was working on a publisher’s bibliography I found several examples of books being sent in toward the end of the year only to wind up not getting registered until the following year. (Usually given as something like “in record: 1952” with a registration date in 1953.) But I also found one that was definitely out in the wilds months, and possibly the year before, the actual registration date.
That was during the era when books had to carry the copyright symbol and year to be considered under copyright. Now that everything is automatically copyright at the time of publication, dates only exist to make life difficult for people who need to care.
Reminds me of Freud. His Dream Interpratation book was published in 1899,but everyone at that time was putting 1900 so they would look like they were part of the new century.
The book lists 1900 as it publish date.
So I’ll think of it like model years of cars.