In the United Kingdom, the right to print, publish and distribute it is a royal prerogative, and the Crown licenses publishers to reproduce it under letters patent. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the letters patent are held by the King’s Printer; in Scotland, they are held by the Scottish Bible Board. The office of the King’s Printer has been associated with the right to reproduce the Bible for centuries, the earliest known reference coming in 1577.

In the 18th century, all surviving interests in the monopoly were bought out by John Baskett. The Baskett rights descended through a number of printers and, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the King’s Printer is now Cambridge University Press, which inherited the right when they took over the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1990.

Other royal charters of similar antiquity grant Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press the right to produce the Authorized Version independently of the King’s Printer. In Scotland, the Authorized Version is published by Collins under licence from the Scottish Bible Board.

The terms of the letters patent prohibit any other than the holders, or those authorized by the holders, from printing, publishing or importing the Authorized Version into the United Kingdom. The protection that the Authorized Version, and also the Book of Common Prayer, enjoy is the last remnant of the time when the Crown held a monopoly over all printing and publishing in the United Kingdom.

Although Crown Copyright usually expires 50 years after publication, Section 171(b) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 made an exception for ‘any right or privilege of the Crown’ not written in an act of parliament, thus preserving the rights of the Crown under the unwritten royal prerogative.

Permission

Within the United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press permits the reproduction of at most 500 verses for “liturgical and non-commercial educational use”, provided that their prescribed acknowledgement is included, the quoted verses do not exceed 25% of the publication quoting them and do not include a complete Bible book. For use beyond this, the Press is willing to consider permission requested on a case-by-case basis and in 2011 a spokesman said the Press generally does not charge a fee but tries to ensure that a reputable source text is used.

Apocrypha

Translations of the books of the biblical apocrypha were necessary for the King James version, as readings from these books were included in the daily Old Testament lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer. Protestant Bibles in the 16th century included the books of the apocrypha—generally, following the Luther Bible, in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments to indicate they were not considered part of the Old Testament text—and there is evidence that these were widely read as popular literature, especially in Puritan circles.

The apocrypha of the King James Version has the same 14 books as had been found in the apocrypha of the Bishops’ Bible; however, following the practice of the Geneva Bible, the first two books of the apocrypha were renamed 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras, as compared to the names in the Thirty-nine Articles, with the corresponding Old Testament books being renamed Ezra and Nehemiah. Starting in 1630, volumes of the Geneva Bible were occasionally bound with the pages of the apocrypha section excluded. In 1644, the Long Parliament forbade the reading of the apocrypha in churches; and in 1666, the first editions of the King James Bible without the apocrypha were bound.

The standardization of the text of the Authorized Version after 1769 together with the technological development of stereotype printing made it possible to produce Bibles in large print-runs at very low unit prices. For commercial and charitable publishers, editions of the Authorized Version without the apocrypha reduced the cost, while having increased market appeal to non-Anglican Protestant readers.

With the rise of the Bible societies, most editions have omitted the whole section of apocryphal books. The British and Foreign Bible Society withdrew subsidies for Bible printing and dissemination in 1826, under the following resolution:

That the funds of the Society be applied to the printing and circulation of the Canonical Books of Scripture, to the exclusion of those Books and parts of Books usually termed Apocryphal;

The American Bible Society adopted a similar policy. Both societies eventually reversed these policies in light of 20th-century ecumenical efforts on translations, the ABS doing so in 1964 and the BFBS in 1966.