Amos Publications Is Completely, Utterly Useless.

I'm a little confused by your comment. By PDF, I pretty much meant going to FrameMaker and chooseing 'Export to PDF." Amos, at this point, is incapable of doing anything fancy with PDF. A simple PDF 1.4/1.5 document that can be opened and searched anywhere would be good enough to replace their current digital offering.

Their current digital offering fails on the following fronts:

• It's online only
• Each page is an image file, so, as you zoom, it gets grainy, even the text.
• You can't pinch and zoom using native gestures on a table; you need to use the + and - buttons on the bottom.

Even the old 2009 PDFs they had on CD solved all these problems, and were pretty universal. I use them on my iPad, Arch Linux laptop, Windows 10 desktop, and my Android phone. Never had an issue opening them.

One thing Amos did get right (for the most part) is the digital edition of Linns. You can download a PDF of the issues, and the dedicated Tablet app, let's me double click on any article, so I can read the whole thing without needing to go to page xx to finish reading the article. You can also download issues for offline use (at least on the iPad. The feature was missing from the Android version last I used it.)

I like the Olive Software for Linn's. Olive's eBook software, however, is a piece of crap.

Would I love the cstalog to be a database. Oh yeah sure. But I'll take a watermarked PDF over what we have now any day.

Well here is something 'official'. Amos' product website will be down another two weeks. This today to me from a staff member:

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

We are currently in the middle of switching to a new platform, and unfortunately the site will be down about another 2 weeks.

Please feel free to phone us to place an order, we currently have free shipping.

Thank you,

XXX

I like how they appear to be trying to leave the impression that this is a planned down period while they redesign. I'd bet their product site went plooey on them and the company they had it outsourced to is either having to do a complete overhaul or they are contracting with another designer. Either way it's bad news for the company's bottom line. They are at least offering free shipping; that may be some incentive- I have a good idea of some things I need so may just call them later this week.

I would like to make a correction to one of my previous statements, EZ Stamp is not Access based but rather an SQL Lite based product. Marios was kind enough to verify this for me, sorry for any confusion.

In regards to Amos and the latest update....
I cannot think of any reasonable justification(s) for being offline for more than a day or two. The proper way to upgrade is to bring the new system up and run it in for a week or so in parallel. Upgrading is the ideal time to also put more redundancy in place if needed. If I was a part of the Amos management team I would also take this opportunity to fire some people and bring in some technical competency.

One of the big questions that Amos customers are probably wondering is not about what has happened, but more about 'what are you doing so that this doesn't happen again?'.
Don

Amos and Andy comedy this is not!
I don't have skin the game since I have yet to subscribe for an Amos e-Catalog account.
This is too amazing for words...one might think that Amos would have a heavyweight online marketing and technical team since obviously the future of their business will be online.

I began seeking info on British Commonwealth albums just as this problem brought the Amos websites down. And it's unbelievable how long Amos has gone "dark". A few days ago I received my Linn's Amos online email promotion; I used the link and of course received an error from my browser -- a notice that the webpage I attempted to reach is not secure and that it might be a security risk such as a phishing site redirect. What the hell is going on at Amos? Were they hacked bad??

My guess is that Amos probably had a catastrophic failure and didn't have things backed up appropriately. About the only conceivable reason I can think of that they'd be down that long is if they have to rebuild everything from scratch. It's almost inconceivable for a multi-million dollar business with global customers to be that backward digitally in 2015. That's a major problem for any company in this day and age and it really makes me wonder what's behind it all. Is it clueless management? Are they hurting so bad financially that they can't even afford basic infrastructure necessities? Either way it doesn't bode well for their future.

I think it is obvious that Amos put the digital age on the back burner, they may even have outsourced 'technology' and are now faced with a deep hole. (Not building your own in-house digital expertise would have been stupid for a publishing company.)

Virtually all publishers were faced with the substantial change in their business models and markets. Everyone saw this coming 15 years ago, so for me the question is 'How could Amos have missed this since 1998?' Were they so arrogant as to think that they could jerk the marketplace around and sit back and coast on their market share? I can see a company waiting a year or two, but surely they saw the handwriting on the wall no later than 2008. If I was running the company, I'd be getting the broom out.
Don

All this is conjecture from the outside looking in, of course, but I think one of their biggest problems is focusing on what they could lose by going digital instead of what they could gain. Instead of seeing the potential for more sales through more ways to buy their products, they're only seeing the costs of buying new computer hardware and software, and the potential for content piracy. I would hope that losing weeks of web sales is an eye opener for them - there's just no way that every buyer is calling them to place the order over the phone. Many have to be just walking away, particularly for commodity-type items like mounts.

For me, this is the #1 reason why I would never purchase catalogs that are only available through online access. The #2 reason is that if for some unforeseen circumstance, the supplier runs into financial problems and closes its site, I lose access forever. I hate this form of DRM and will only ever purchase digital catalogs when they can be downloaded to my PC/iPad.

Like 51studebaker says, plenty companies have been or were slow to recognize the ways their business model would be changed forever by the digital age. But me thinks that the profit margins and product offering enjoyed by Amos may have limited the company's financial ability to invest the bucks to build a top-tier IT team and functionality. Amos edits, designs, prints and distributes the equivalent to "the phone book". Based on the average lifespan of the typical stamp album -- say 35 years -- and the number of collectors who make their own albums, or buy used albums. Add in the number of collectors who buy and recycle Scott catalogues rather than pay higher prices for new books. Also figure in the shrinking market size as older collectors sell off or give away their life-long collections.

Does stamp book publishing sound like the same business model that is driving Microsoft, Uber, Google, or Toyota? No.

Publishing big, heavy books that are expensive to produce and to ship, and market them to a shrinking number of customers guarantees two things: 1) tight profit margins, and 2) financial vulnerability. Amos' web problems could be due to out-of-touch management, but my guess is that Amos is a victim of the marketplace. Since I became active in this Forum, I would guess that 50% of the shared comments about stamp albums and catalogs have expressed collector preferences for printing Steiners, using blank quadrille pages, buying used albums, and recycling older stamp catalogs from libraries -- all of these choices erode Amos sales.

Based on the very poor website product information available across stamp industry companies, I would say a majority of companies, including Gibbons, Lighthouse, and Amos spend very tight budgets on their online marketing sites. Example: I just ordered the Gibbons product sales catalog because it is impossible to compare their online albums and have any chance of understanding the differences and specific specs between the Windsor Elite, Imperial, One Country, Windsor Sovereign albums. I hate to believe this is lack of attention is a marketing oversight (which it might be!). I just think the global stamp supplies companies have all been hurt by ebay and other online auctions and stamp dealers.

Dan,
I agree with much of your post but would add that publishing companies in particular have been impacted by the paradigm shift with how people get information. This was widely understood by the publishing industry at least 15 years ago. Some publishing companies recognized this obvious change and started modifying how they did business. Others 'dipped a big toe' and made less of a commitment. And then there were some who, for whatever reasons, decide to not invest much at all. Readers can decide for themselves which path Amos took.

We also have a fair amount of hobbyists who firmly believe in 'old school' ways of becoming well educated in philately. They invested countless hours and dropped a lot of money in gaining their expertise. But the expectations of the current younger generation is being able to instantly find and use free real-time information. I have some serious concerns about the lack of vetting of much of the online information published; in my opinion this is leaving the door open for entities like Amos and APS to step in and make a difference.

Unfortunately they seem to have missed the boat, it left the dock over a decade ago. It is easy to see why, this is not small change. It meant having enough management backbone to make a substantial change and commitment in the way they made money, if they made the wrong decisions they probably would not have been able to recover. Of course, the current path isn't looking too attractive for them either but the typical default corporate behavior is to do today what they did the day before. So I do not see Amos as a victim. They had plenty of time years ago to star investing in the future and dealing with the sweeping changes that were impacting the entire publishing industry.
Don

And Amos could do something about that and compete with Steiner by offering their own print-your-own (PYO) pages, offer album generating software, sell good e-catalogs which could ONLY be purchased from Amos,etc. They wouldn't have to necessarily compete with Steiner purely on price (which would be very difficult). However, if their PYO pages contained Scott numbers and/or illustrations, etc, I know I'd have been willing to spend more on them than I would on Steiner. Yes, it would be an expensive project to redo their entire album line to have a PYO option, but if they'd have done this little by little over the last 10 years it would have been doable without a huge financial commitment on their part. Same with other digital upgrades to their offerings.

I think an apt analogy is that they were like the French sitting behind the Maginot Line, with a false sense of security due to their commanding market share. If you wanted stamp information and comprehensive stamp albums 15-20 years ago and you lived in the US, you almost certainly bought from Scott. They had very little real competition and they probably saw little reason to change. My guess is that they'll hobble along in their current state as long as they're still profitable, and then look for a buyer when it gets to the point where they're no longer making money.

Just a comment about "50% of the shared comments about stamp albums and catalogs have expressed collector preferences for printing Steiners, using blank quadrille pages, buying used albums, and recycling older stamp catalogs from libraries".

If Amos put out a product that met the needs of these collectors at the right price, no one would be using Steiner pages. Essentially Amos is ignoring 50% of collectors and thus forfeiting 50% of potential sales. I am kind of glad that Amos has not tried to fill this void. Looking at there track record if they were to do anything it would be to purchase the rights to the Steiner pages and either discontinue them or reprice them at 20 times the current price.

By announcing the catalog format changes for 2018 and not specifying what they are, I believe they have set in stone horrible catalog sales for 2017. I know I will be waiting on the 2018s for my next purchase.

I've been following this thread with great interest, and I completely agree with Don. Interesting you bring up Yellow Pages dcaraz1949. I was cleaning out my pantry this fall and found the last phone book we squirreled away. It was from 2012, when we cut our land line. YP had to drastically rethink and retool their business. I have a friend who is a YP sales person. She is just as often selling websites as ads. I won't comment on the quality of those sites, but YP recognized they are a media company first and that book publishing is a vanishing part of their plan. Scott has missed so many opportunities to leverage their intellectual property (so many of these opportunities have been discussed here and in other threads) it's mind boggling.

I agree that the contraction in this hobby is a major hurdle to developers. You go to where the money is. But has Scott's vision deficit contributed to the decline of interest itself? What if Scott developed a custom album printing app? Why not offer a subscription-based website development program which allows dealers to easily list their offerings? The possibilities are (were) endless.

BTW Don, how are you feeling? Are you up for lunch?

Imagine an album app in which you could 'drag and drop' the stamps you wanted from a tree on the left hand side of the page. As you dropped the stamp, or range of stamps, on the page it would add the bounding box for each size stamp. You would also be able to add as much or as little additional info such as year, perf, description, designer, qty. printed, catalog number, format (single, block, cover) etc. And of course you would be able to apply one of many page borders to customize your album. You could save and share your albums with other people. You would also be able to access and modify existing as templates such as a National Album as a starting point. You would be able to save these to your own computer or device or you could get them to print them on one of several choices of paper types and ship it to you.

And for catalogs, there would be a 'catalog builder' app available. In the same fashion, you drag and drop the sections which you want. You could load up on specialized back of book and/or make sections by country. If you choose the online version, you could add ebay and other auctions links, average price calculation based on these auctions sites, and the Amos Scott catalog values if desired. The catalog would support the quick development of checklists such as 'want lists'. For other customers, Amos would print a customize catalog which was spiral bound and shipped to you.

The above is not a fantasy, it is within reach if Amos had a well designed SQL database to use as a foundation for their products. One database for everything they produce. And if Amos had something like these apps they would be; a market leader, better positioned to move into the future, and be supporting the hobby by being relevant to younger folks. They would also be in a great position to greatly enhance their web site with much more free information. They would driving large amount of traffic to their site by transforming into the 'go to ' place to find basic but quality info, this would enable them to capture additional tie-in sales and ad revenue.
Don

Randall, thank you for asking. I'm feeling better than I have in 10 years! Dialysis kind of sucks but hey, I'm vertical! I'm ready to do lunch anytime, I have some new material to look though if you are up for some trading.