I just got an email from Amos telling me that that Scott Catalog will be available online later this year.
I replied asking them to make sure APIs were available, so collecting software could hook into the catalog and pull stamp information for people that subscribe to the catalog.
Great news! I would love to have a full suite of catalogues available on the go. I wonder if they will be available via smartphones? How great would it be to be able to access these while at a stamp show?!?
I asked them to make APIs available for software developers. Then I could buy the app of my choice with "Scott Online Support", enter my username and password into the app, and have it pull data down from their site. Move the burden onto the consumer rather than the developer to license the catalog. Give independent and open source developers a leg up against the big guys in the field.
If I am paying $9.99 a month for access to the Scott Catalog, then I would expect I can pipe my access through an app. Heck, apps like EZstamp come with the US Scott Catalog in them for lookups, and that app costs only $55 to purchase.
If they offered APIs for app developers they would be so far ahead of Michel and Stanley Gibbons.
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Posted 07/18/2011 10:46 am
