Events have moved on apace since my last post three weeks ago. For a start, the publication date moved in stages out to 7th August before coming back in to the 4th August, and the Waterstones web advert which had vanished, reappeared. Then, suddenly, on Saturday 28th June we received an email from the Production Editor saying that the book had been published with information available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86470-4. We have subsequently received a Congratulatory email from Springer and this together with the website information provides a revealing example of how academic publishing is now operating.
The Congratulatory email includes advice on how to ‘Maximize the impact of your book’ and offers use of ‘a suite of bespoke marketing assets to help you spread the word’. Also included was a link to a PDF version of the published text. The Springer site advises that the ebook (£119.50) was published on 27June, the hardback (£149.99) on 28June, and that the softback will be published on 12July 2026 (price not yet specified). The site also provides a list of the book’s chapters, each of which can be opened to reveal the summary abstract we had been asked to provide, and the full set of references together with any digital links we had included. Each chapter can be purchased separately for £19.95, or one can take out a Springer subscription for £29.99 a month entitling you to download 10 Chapters/articles per month (which, interestingly, would get you pretty much the whole of Collecting in the Icon Age!). Those with appropriate credentials may also be able to login via their institution and get content for free if the institution concerned has come to a separate arrangement with the publisher.
Since hearing that the book has been published, I’ve been working on the supplementary material we are providing in the pwofc website. This includes a single document containing all the references each with an appropriate web link. In searching for such links over the last week I’ve noticed that in several cases, extracts from our book are already appearing in the hit lists. Furthermore, I discovered that previews of many pages of the book (including the whole of chapter 1) are available in Google Books ‘displayed by permission of Springer Nature. Copyright’. All this in less than 7 days since publication.
Two things stand out to me from all this: first, there is a surprisingly large amount of information available for free about the book. It is probably not sufficient if you really are interested in the subject – but you can get a pretty good idea about what the book contains. Second, there is clearly a focused effort to monetise the publication in every possible way.
Now that we’ve achieved publication, I don’t intend to provide any further running commentaries on progress. The material we are providing to supplement the book is in the Icon Age Collecting section of this website, and that is where we intend to conduct any dialogues about the book that should arise.