copyright help: Where do you go to get copyright dates, publishers, and copyright city’s? - Help.com

The suggested link to the Help.com primer on copyright is quite informative. One paragraph in particular seems to indicate that there isn’t a master list or directory of copyrights. The best you can do is go to individual book publishers or authors and ask them for a list of their personal titles and publication dates.

Here’s the relevant paragraph from the Help.com primer:

In the United States, copyright has relatively recently been made automatic (in the style of the Berne Convention), which has had the effect of making it appear to be more like a property right. Thus, as with property, a copyright need not be granted or obtained through official registration with any Government Office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape or a letter), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce his or her exclusive rights. However, while a copyright need not be officially registered for the copyright owner to begin exercising his exclusive rights, registration of works (where the laws of that jurisdiction provide for registration) does have benefits; it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney’s fees (whereas in the USA, for instance, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits). The original holder of the copyright may be the employer of the actual author rather than the author himself if the work is a “work for hire”. Again, this principle is widespread; in English law the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that where a work in which copyright subsists is made by an employee in the course of that employment, the copyright is automatically assigned to the employer.