Scott Catalog 2015 Digital Plans

"That's easy to get around - how about assigning stamps a GSI (Global Stamp Identification) number"

Actually ISIS in Iraq is now ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant) and tomorrow it will be something different, perhaps ISLMSAL (Islamic State Levant Maghreb South Asia London), though most people aren't paying much attention to the name changes.

So ISIS is now available for a numbering system. . . . :-)

Actually, it's no laughing matter but a huge and horrific tragedy.

I asked for permission to use Scott numbers on my Ukrainian stamp pages available on my site.

Amos legal got back to me and told me they would not let me use the catalog numbers for free. When I asked if I could buy a license, they told me they could not offer to license the numbers to me either, because my free stamp album directly competes with a product they sell, which is an album for Ukrainian Stamps.

I did ask them how Mystic gets to use Scott numbers in their Heirloom album and they told me that Mystic spends a lot of money on advertising with them, so they made an exception for them.

The Scott numbers have been around a long time. I wonder if a legal argument can be made that a subset of those numbers (perhaps 19th century), can now be considered public domain.

Their numbering system is the most precious commodity they have and if I were them, I would guard it like a bulldog.

I'll add my thoughts on the new electronic Scott catalog. I had bought a couple electronic ones in previous years and was generally pleased with my purchases. The main benefit was being able to bring my iPad to shows instead of a bulky catalog (or catalogs). So, I was planning to purchase the US Specialized electronic this Fall when the newone came out and just add that to my iPad. Now we've got the new version and, despite what everyone said, I decided to give it a try when I learned that the US Section for Volume I was only $18.

I have US from volume I and it's running, but it's clearly a step backwards from what we've had in the past. The need for an Internet connection is bad enough, but the way they've done it will keep me from ever wanting to buy one of these things again. It doesn't save many pages in memory and requires a high speed connection to be useful at anything resembling the speed at which you can look things up in a catalog (goodbye use at a show). I have a high speed fiber optic connection at home and it's slow even on that. Not only that, but the app they put it in is poorly written -- difficult to turn pages or zoom, etc. Amos, take note: stop penalizing your loyal customers (I just spent $500 on albums from you guys) because a few bad apples are copying and give us a real ebook we can browse quickly and offline!

I've enjoyed reading all of your posts. A lot of good discussion here.

Why put up with all the hassle? Simple have a digital stamp collection! You can amass it online or on your hard drive. Go online copy and past onto your digital pages. If you want to hold it in your hands, print it out and place it in your album! You could have a $400,000 or a million dollar stamp in your collection absolutely FREE!

OUCH! OUCH! OUCH! I can feel you all hitting me about the head & shoulders; cut it out, it's just a joke! OUCH!

To add some context as to what the online Scott catalog *could* be, as opposed to just an app/web wrapper around unprintable pages, I'm going to post some content that I presented on a coin collecting board several years ago.

By way of background, Krause publications publishes the industry standard (in the U.S. at any rate) Catalog of World Coins in 5 volumes. Huge tomes, some of which dwarf the Scott catalogs in page count. Current pagecount of the 5 printed volumes is 7,848 pages.

Several years ago they started offering their "Numismaster" product, which is the online equivalent of their printed catalog, but in database format, not eBook. While you can subscribe to individual volumes, the best deal is their "All Access Pass" which gets you access to all 5 volumes, plus a Canadian coins guide and a special volume called "Unusual World Coins" which contains fantasy issues that while not legitimately issued, are collectible nonetheless and are frequently encountered in the marketplace.

The regular price of an annual subscription is $110 per year, but have historically had deals where you could subscribe for as little as $35 per year.

It is a website, but without the handicapping and lockdown that Amos Publishing inflicts upon its users. Note the increased feature set with respect to wantlists and collection portfolio, as well as the fact you can easily print things.

Downsides: (1) The search interface is clumsy, and despite mountainous feedback and testing suggestions, they have not updated it. Still, I have no problems using it on my iPad or Android cellphone. (2) Because it is a website, use requires an active internet connection; no offline use.

Here is the main search screen. The denominations become selectable as you select a country (or type one in):




Clicking the "Find My Coin" button then takes you to the general search results screen shown below. This is one of the problems I have with the product: even if I selected the denomination from the list on the prior page, it still treats ALL query results as partial matches, in this case showing all denominations that have "Rupie" in them rather than just Rupies.




From the above screen you can click the "View details link at right" and get the details on that KM#.




If you notice, on both the preceding screens there are either "Add to Want List" or "Add to Portfolio" links, which take you to screens like that shown below. Presumably you could use this to track your collection and pricing/value would be updated as updates to the Krause catalogs are made. I don't use this aspect of the product. Note that you can upload images of the items you add to your portfolio. It seems to be a (limited?) numismatic equivalent of EZ-Stamp or other stamp collection management software.




Also, unlike Amos, they offer a free sample guide and the ability to explore the features:

http://www.numismaster.com/ta/insid...ge=SignUpNow

Now that is impressive.

Now that's more what I'm looking for. Heck, Amos could even use the same software platform these guys are using. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Not if they rolled it in-house, they couldn't.

Here is a concept that Amos needs to embrace that I think they'll have a real hard time with:

When you buy the printed catalog, you should get a free copy of the digital catalog.

Sure they could, they'd just have to buy or license the code from Krause, assuming they would cooperate, of course. Either way, what we're talking about isn't exactly rocket science and there's more than likely an off-the-shelf product that will work just fine, or at least "fine enough".

I think the problem is that they don't have the data fully digitized and just plain fear that it will be abused and/or cause the sales of print catalogs to plummet. I would imagine that their printing cost per volume depends on the number of volumes printed. In other words, say they came out with a killer online catalog tomorrow and sales of their printed catalogs dropped by 50% or more. Their printing cost on each volume would likely go up considerably, forcing them to raise prices even higher on the print version. I would imagine this is a consideration for them. Not everyone wants to go digital (not even close to everyone) and they don't want to risk alienating print buyers by raising prices even further. When one starts to dig into all the implications, it really is something that could make things worse if it's not done right, not only from a hobbyist/user perspective but a business perspective.

I do like the idea that buying a print catalog should get you a free online login for that volume.

So, I sent the fine folks at Amos an email and told them, that unless they can confirm that the next version of the Android and iOS apps are going to have offline access for every page of every purchase and native pinch and zoom, I want a full refund for my purchase.

It's obviously the weekend, so I don't expect to hear anything back until about Tuesday. We'll see. The US section was not expensive. If I lose the money, I won't cry. But the only way to show a company your dis-satisfaction is with hitting their bottom line.

If you bought any "eBook" and are unhappy with your purchase, let them know. I guarantee you, they will not read this 7 page thread. There's just not enough of them to keep up on social media.

Scott now has a free sample available to peruse (that was one of the things I suggested they do rather than force people to buy in order to experience the functionality and interface). I spent some time with it this morning, and...

BLEAGH!

A huge step backwards in quality and functionality from the iPad version.

1. The interface is absolutely clumsy on any touch device; the olive reader doesn't support pinch zoom on mobile devices, and has no keyboard shortcuts for desktop use.

2. By not having pinch zoom, the zoom levels supported by the software are only at specific discrete percentages; you cannot size to a specfic screen size. So for example on my iPad, I cannot fit-to-screen. I'm left with either only viewing part of a page on the screen or not using the entire screen. I can't optimize the zoom level. Amazingly stupid.

3. Unlike the vector-based PDF versions that were "underneath the hood" on the iPad version, the pages are pre-rasterized, which has a host of downsides:

A. At high manification, the text is very blurry. This was NOT the case with iPad, since the text would rerender the text at native resolution when you zoomed in or out.

B. The images are HEAVILY compressed, resulting in significant JPEG artifacting.

C. The pages take longer to download.

4. The search is clumsy. Unlike a normal PDF search, which takes you to the first or next occurrence within the document, this search takes you away from the document to a list of results, where you choose a result to then go to that page.

5. As has been previously mentioned, no offline use.

Given that the prices for these are quite a bit higher than the iPad versions were, it's a complete nonstarter in my opinion.

smh.

They're claiming the search is greatly improved. I think it's greatly improved because it's searching one file now. The old catalog was broken down into multiple small PDF files that were encrypted.

The search *results* may be improved, but in my opinion the search *experience* is not.