The Catalog Makers Need To Learn From The Rpg Industry

The role playing game industry has really embraced digital distribution. The #1 site right now to get RPG books is http://www.rpgnow.com.

On RPGnow, you can buy a PDF of any rulebook or supplement the company makes available. The file is a PDF that you can view on any device you like. It contains a watermark at the bottom of each page with your name and order number. And the file is locked, so it can't be edited.

RPGnow also does comics and eBooks.

When Wizards of the Coast decided to release all their old Dungeons and Dragons releases back to the 70s in digital format, they went to RPGnow. They created a web site for them called dndclassics.com and you were able to buy anthing you wanted using your RPGnow account.

I'm sure the catalog makers can reach out to this company, or one like it, and offer us watermarked PDFs, which is really, at least for me, the preferred way to get a digital catalog.

Whew, what a relief. I thought this was going to be about Rocket-Propelled Grenades and I was braced for some serious bloodshed.

DRM (digital rights management) such as stamping each PDF with a name and number, is not cheap. Additionally, stamp catalog producers have a big issue to resolve. Is the catalog fully available off line or not? These are not a small 50-100 page PDF files, the content includes thousands of high resolution images which makes loading and downloading an issue.

Do they allow off-line use by loading the all the images locally? If they support off-line use, how do they deal with frequent need to update? (Having thousands of copies in the field can be a costing nightmare to update.)

But I agree that the existing catalog producers have used copyright issues as justification to avoid going digital in a significant way. The paradigm shift of the internet offering the same info in real time and for free is a difficult challenge for them to tackle. Access to instant, free information has now become ubiquitous, users expect to be able to use their smart phone to retrieve info 24/7. Yet we still have philatelic legacy entities like Amos and APS who are clinging to the old model of charging for info access. As time goes on, more and more philatelic info will be freely available online and these organizations will either be forced to change or go under.
Don

Role Playing Games !@#$%!? Like the kids say: not your father's RPGs.

The Stanley Gibbons app on the iPad allowed me to buy the 2015 Ireland catalog for $12.95. It's available offline for me to use with images.

As for watermarking.. That's not something that Scott or SG or MICHEL need to worry about. If you look at the current Scott offering, it's being hosted on Olive Software's website. I'm sure Olive gets a cut of every sale.

For RPGnow, the publisher uploads a PDF they generate through whataver seller interface they have. RPGnow then does the heavy lifting. They sell you the product. They process the credit card transaction. They watermark the PDF on demand. And you get your money minus whatever their fee is.

Anyone selling information today, including stamp catalog publishers, needs to make that information available in a variety of formats. I prefer online access rather than a download, that way I can view it from any device, almost anywhere. The ability to search, sort, manipulate, modify, compile and output the information would be a huge plus, and is what I'd like the most. Hopefully Scott can come up with something like this before they go out of business...

We've had some of these discussions before. I believe Scott still edits their catalogs by hand. They're not even close to ready to go with a database. If their numbering system wasn't the de-facto standard with US collectors, they'd have been out of business a long time ago.

People keep trying to spin up new numbering systems but they never catch on. Perhaps the next generation of stamp collectors will see the value in a universal numbering system and crowdsourced stamp varieties.

I don't know if you've ever used a service like Discogs or Musicbrainz, that is trying to create a catalog of all he world's music. If you find a new release of an existing album not in their database, you can add it, and then it goes on hold while others vote on it. If your commit gets a certain number of votes, it is marked as an official release and added to the database.

I'd love to see someone try a system like that.

Discogs is wonderful...I use it as a reference all the time for music, and it is very user-friendly to add information to.

I think stampworld.com is trying to do something like this, users can add information to it (new issues, varieties etc)

It's kind of like the QWERTY keyboard. Better systems have been devised, but no one wants to re-learn a different way of doing something they're already proficient at.

Yeah, I would love to see as much philatelic material available in pdf format as the gaming industry has made available. HOWEVER ... I don't thing TSR is the best example. You do realize that up until they went to RPGNow's platforms, all that old 1E, 2E and 3E stuff was available for FREE from their website, right?

"Let's find out what they'll pay for what used to be free."

When printing and distribution costs are often 75% of cost, online books and games and etc are seriously overpriced.

I have never seen the older stuff on their web site for free. There were a few things, but I don't ever remember seeing a 1E or 2E Player's Handbook available for free.

It was all out there free, unless it was an RPGA exclusive or one of the few things stuck in the copyright flux. Legit pdf downloads not bootlegs. Darn near every Dragon and Dungeon as well.

To stay on topic too...
There is a lot of philatelic info becoming available for free or at a reasonable price of membership. Part of me is frustrated though, when I track down an OOP book and then later find it is a free pdf #128544;

To steer back on topic also.

I just want a PDF of the catalog. I hate Scott's current solution. I'm buying pages from CHIROKMD and scanning them in, since Scott doesn't offer offline digital access to their catalog.

SG does offer offline access, but the catalog is tied to their app. I have an iPad Air 2 and was planning to flip over to an Android tablet. Since SG doesn't make their app available for Android, I couldn't view my catalog on my new tablet. I ******* hate vendor lock in like this.

These guys are all so obsessed with piracy and DRM. But none of them realize that I can get any book scanned to a PDF for $1.00/100 pages. The if I want to be an @ss, I could post it online and bypass all the effort they're going through.

Amos just does not seem to get that if they would produce catalogs we consumers actually want, they might actually increase sales and profitability. AMG is a good example. I would buy a print and pdf (alternating years) if one was available. Since one isn't, I made my own from my old catalogs. Ripped them up and made myself a pdf from the pages I needed and parsed out the country pages I didn't on ebay.

I made a comment in a different thread that I would even gladly pay for a simple download of catalog data in Excel format with no pictures or anything - and they could even leave out the footnotes and general text explanations. I like to keep inventory in a spreadsheet, and inputting catalog data is mind-numbing and time consuming. I'd gladly pay $20, maybe even more, if I could just download a simple Excel file of just Germany. I'm not sure if they're so far behind the times they can't even do that or if they're just ultra-paranoid about someone distributing the digital files without their permission. However, they'd probably figure out a way to make that unusable as well, probably by protecting the file so you can't edit or copy the data.

One of the software companies, can't remember if it's StampManage or the other one, has all their data in an MDB file. You can load it up in Access and extract what you need out of it.