HarperCollins Publishers

HarperCollins Publishers appears in the e-book’s front matter as both a rights-bearing publishing organization and a group with listed offices in four countries. The notices identify its role in the PerfectBound digital edition, name regional corporate entities, and provide postal addresses for its Australian, Canadian, British, and United States operations.

Corporate Names and Regional Offices

The publisher information uses distinct legal names for different territories rather than presenting a single undifferentiated company name. In Australia, it lists HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd., at 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, New South Wales 2073, with a post-office box address in Pymble. The entry also supplies the Australian PerfectBound website.

For Canada, the listed entity is HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., at 55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900, Toronto, Ontario. The United Kingdom entry gives the same corporate form, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., at 77–85 Fulham Palace Road in London, and supplies a separate UK PerfectBound website. These notices establish country-specific contact details, but do not explain the legal or organizational relationships among the regional companies.

In the United States, the publisher is identified as HarperCollins Publishers Inc., at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022. This American corporate name also appears in the digital-edition trademark notice, linking the organization directly to the product’s branding.

PerfectBound and the Digital Edition

The copyright and access notice identifies PerfectBound and its logo as trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. The e-book’s access terms state that readers receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text on-screen after paying the required fees. They also prohibit reproduction, transmission, downloading, decompilation, reverse engineering, and storage or introduction of the text into an information retrieval system without express written permission from PerfectBound.

The notices thus frame the edition not only as a text to be read but as a controlled digital publication. HarperCollins’s connection to PerfectBound is explicit in the trademark statement; the surrounding restrictions specify the permitted on-screen use and enumerate activities that are not authorized by the access grant.

Publication and Edition Context

The book’s digital publication details identify a Microsoft Reader edition issued in December 2003, with ISBN 0-06-073328-4. A further note says the e-book was set from the Agatha Christie Signature Edition published by HarperCollins in London. Together, these details distinguish the digital format and release date from the print edition on which its text was based.

The front matter also carries a 1950 copyright notice for Agatha Christie Limited and a separate notice for an excerpted essay by Charles Osborne from The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, copyrighted in 1982 and 1999 and reprinted with permission. These statements identify different rights notices attached to the volume; they do not assign those copyrights to HarperCollins. HarperCollins’s documented role here is specifically in the edition’s publishing, regional contact information, and PerfectBound branding.