Scott Catalog 2015 Digital Plans

Has Amos really come out and said that sofware piracy is the reason for their slow advance to the electronic age? If so, they are really paranoid.

Their software will not be subject to piracy any more than others, such as DVDs, computer applications, eBooks, etc. Yet they have no problem continuing to survive.

Auto theft has not stopped the auto industry.

Credit card fraud has not stopped the credit industry.

Quark Xpress? Seriously?

Oy.

I worked as a digital prepress technician in commercial offset printing from 1993 to 2005. Over those 12 years I saw the industry change from 95% Mac and 80% Quark to 50% Mac and 20% Quark. By the time I left, InDesign had a dominant market position, and much of it on the PC.

The trend AWAY from Quark has only increased since then, to the point that Quark is now only a has-been application used primarily by older designers who never made the shift, or firmly entrenched legacy workflows (Amos).

I have correspondences with someone at Amos won's full time used to be combing ebay for listings of pirated CDs/DVDs for sale.

I wonder if some part of their reluctance to fully embrace digital is the fear of what will happen to sales of the print version. Libraries have to be their biggest customer, but many of them wouldn't continue to buy copies every year if the prices get too high. If collectors and dealers go digital en masse and sales of the print catalogs plummet, their printing cost per volume would likely increase and they'd have to raise prices again and again in a death spiral. I have no idea if libraries would subscribe to a digital version or not (or even if Amos would allow such an arrangement) but I assume some probably would, some probably wouldn't.

Quark XPress has it's place. They dropped the ball, and they're trying to get it back. But it might be too late.

I just hate Adobe. The fact that they started the software subscription model pisses me off. Why would you RENT InDesign or Photoshop? I hope to God the software rental model falls on it's ass and fails. If Quark was smart, they'd advertise the fact that when you buy Xpress, you OWN it, and it will not stop working just because someone forgot to pay a bill.

Protecting the "crown jewels" at Scott/Amos has always been a high priority.

Kimberly-Clark has trademarked the name "Kleenex." They get unhappy if the TM symbol is dropped and even more unhappy if the word is not capitalized.

wow - wow - wow, triple wow.




I would have thought they at least had a rudimentary database exporting XML into indesign or Quark. That's been doable for a decade now!

Dan, I changed all my quark files (at least the ones I needed to update) over to InDesign back in 2004. I've never regretted moving to InDesign. I used to hate Illustrator and used Macromedia Freehand instead. Once Adobe bought Macromedia and revamped Illustrator I'm much happier.

And as a professional designer, I love the subscription model of having access to ALL Adobe apps for the price of 1 billed hour per month. Updates are seamless, payment is automated, and frankly it's much cheaper than buying their software. with my workflow it's money well spent.

I hate Typekit though...

DRM is a dinosaur that hopefully will soon become extinct. Apple abandoned DRM for music years ago and it has not affected sales in the least. Besides it takes about 2 seconds to remove DRM. In the case of ebooks, this is not done for piracy sake, but to able to read your ebook on any device you want ( Amazon uses a mobi/azw3 book format, while all others use epub/pdf format).

Ebook sellers have gone out of business and those who did not back up their library by removing the DRM lost the ability to access their purchases. While a very remote possibility, if Amos does go out of business, you may be stuck with products you can no longer access, depending on the DRM used.

Amos' DRM will only anger legitimate purchasers - those who pirate their products (and all DRM can be removed) will not be hindered by any type of restriction whatsoever.

You are off a bit on items 4 and 5. When I wanted to put my 2009 DVD's on my new Win 8 computer I had to call Scott and get new code numbers, a separate one for each catalog. Once you got that installation out of the way you could copy the DVD contents to your hard disk and access the PDF's without inserting the CD/DVD.

On item 1, you only had to connect to the Internet to register the files initially.

Still, that number 3 was a mess. I had to reinstall Reader 8 on my Win 8 computer to set up the DVD's there. There was a method to use later versions of Acrobat once you had installed the PDF's in Reader 8. You had to copy fopen32.api from the Reader 8 directory to the newer Reader directory. And, of course, you could only view the PDF's with Adobe software; alternate readers did not work.

I went and played with the Michel eBook today, and it seems it's just not Scott. Michel's ebook offering also requires Flash anfd does not have offline access. But they don't make an app, so there is no expectation of offline access and pinch and zoom. PLus they offer a 20 Euro discount for the ebook.

I was on Scottonline.com today and noticed that the 2015 US Specialized is available as an eBook already, but amosadvantage.com does not have the print version available yet.

I doubt the catalog manufacturers will get where many of us would like them to be, technology-wise, in the near future. The incentive is just not there.

I concur about the Michel eBook. I tried it once, and that was enough. Michel's close, but they're not quite ready to make the jump. They already have the data from their German specialized catalog in database form -- they sell an inventory program that was (is?) Access-based. My hope is that one day, they'll make an SQL-based database or an app that's worthwhile.

I finally gave up and converted my hard-copy catalogs to PDF so I could carry them around with me.

****, you had me checking over there. It's not available, just listed (no "BUY" icon next to it). Same with the 2015 Classic Specialized.

Hi ClassicalStamps,

Thank you for the book info and your encouragement. Very much appreciated.

Terry

I just installed the demo of Stamp Manage. To say "fully exposed" is an understatement. It's a consequence of the tools they chose to use to develop the app.

Stamp Manage is poised to offer a hosted solution, however, since that data can just as easily be ported to SQL, Oracle or MySQL.