Questions About Digital Versions Of The Scott Catalog

The iPad app is quite handy, especially in terms of taking to shows or dealers. However, the interface is quite primitive and if you archive your purchased volumes and re-download, or if you switch Apple devices, you lose all your bookmarks.

For me it was a great improvement over buying the print version of the U.S. Specialized, for 2 reasons: (1) I really am only interested in the back-of-book sections, and the iPad version gives me the option of buying just the second half for $29.99 rather than having to buy the whole thing (and this will be especially true for the 2014 edition, as the print versions have gone up $20 per volume, but the digital pricing is staying at the same prices they were last year), and (2) I've always had to cut out the revenue pages and scan them into the computer in order to get portable versions or copies I want to mark up; screen captures from the iPad are nondestructive and much better quality.

When the Scott iPad app first came out, that was prior to the "retina" versions of the iPad, so the screen was much lower resolution, hence the resulting screen captures were lower resolution. In fact, they were not suitable for printing. With the new iPad generations, the screenshots you can take are suitable for high-resolution printing, which makes it perfect for me.

Here are portions of two screenshots taken from within the Scott iPad app. The first was done on my 1st generation iPad before I sold it, and the second is from my iPad 3. It's a huge difference.

Thanks for the screenshots, Dan! The difference between the first iPad and the iPad 3 is very clear to see.

I think printing the screen captures and creating a reference work (kind of like your own custom catalog) is a clever idea.

If I may ask you two detailed question:
How many screen captures and pages do you print?
What are you using for your high-res printing?

Thanks!
--Kevin

I only do screenshots of the revenue section of the U.S. specialized right now, as that's the only section I really need to mark up on a regular basis. All the other sections I simply reference onscreen. So it's about 40 pages.

I have a Dell 5100cn color laser printer with automatic duplex (2-sided) printing that I use.

I love having Scott on my iPad 3. The ability to zoom in makes life a lot easier for these old eyes. But you can barely call it an app. Searching is primitive at best. The ability to bookmark helps, but there's no way to manage those bookmarks. You can't even delete them, as far as I can figure out. It's really just having a bunch of PDFs.

I still have the iPad. My kids are just using it now.

The app was stable, but limited. Like I said, it's just a front end to the PDFs. Prior to that, I had a complete set of 2009 PDFs (which I have since learned from both Amos and SCF were pirated), and I would load those into GoodReader and I was able to annotate them, highlight them and do all sorts of other cool stuff I can't do with the existing app.

The app was stable, but it was primitive. If it's an app, it should behave like an app, not like a reader for a PDF file.

Thanks, everyone, for your opinions and advice!
revenuecollector said:


oldcrow74 said:


apastuszak said:



Okay--the consensus is that the Scott catalogue app is not much more than a PDF reader, and everyone used the word, "primitive," to describe it.

As Dan pointed out, the key technological advantage is not that the software has improved, but the quality of the display (on the iPad 3) has. Does it seem to anyone else that the folks at Amos/Scott are depending more on the goodwill and morals of the stamp collecting community to choose the iPad version (and shun the pirate copies of the 2009 Scott), rather than providing collectors with a desirable product?

It sounds like the 2009 version is still the best option in terms of functionality, as long as you do not need up-to-date pricing or new issue listings--or have no moral qualms about buying a pirated copy. Disappointing.

Questions:

Have any other worldwide publishers like Stanley Gibbons, Michel, Yvert & Teller, et al. produced a digital version of their catalogues? I thought that Michel had, but I know nothing about it.

Does anyone have any experience with one of the specialty catalogue publishers (like Facit or Sassone, etc.) producing a digital version?

Thanks, again!
--Kevin

Stanley Gibbons has an iPad app. I haven't bought any catalogs from it.