2017 Scott US Specialized Ecatalog Search Not Finding Catalog Numbers

Year by year Amos Press continues to steer Scott Catalogs closer to extinction. This year the new 2017 US Specialized eCatalog seems to have lost important search capabilities. In the 2016 catalog it was possible to search by catalog number. While the results were somewhat random, usually the lowest relevant result would be for the stamp listing itself. Now, the 2017 catalog returns no results. I don't know if the change was intentional or due to lack testing. If it was intentional, it means that the already pathetic navigation capabilities of the 2016 eCatalog are further abridged to the point of being useless.

Will organized philately become collateral damage from the eventual demise of the printed Scott Catalogs? It will be if no useful electronic alternative is available. Ideally, an eCatalog would have more features, links and information than the printed catalog and should save time. Has Amos Press concluded that a search capability is not needed in the eCatalog because it doesn't exist in the print version?

I guess it will be time for another phone call tomorrow. Maybe they can fix the search problem, since it is a regression from last year. Asking them to move away from the unannotated PDF version to a fully interactive versions seems hopeless and may have to wait until Amos either fails or sells the catalog.

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

Bummer. :(

And as an aside, how does their ecatalog work with respect to long-term access? Is it a yearly subscription? Or do you have access "forever"?

Access is "forever" but forever is almost here. I don't know if there is some fine print somewhere to sunset the subscription of a specific catalog.

I am not sure if the project is very successful. Based on the invoice number, all time number of subscriptions is between eight and nine thousand. Also, hopes that it could be used at stamp shows have been dashed a couple of times because Internet access on the show floor is not a priority with some show promoters.

I love the Amos note...
"Warning: Any Scott eCatalogue greater than 850 pages will not display in its entirety using Internet Explorer 11. Users of IE 11 should use Chrome or Safari to view the entire eCatalogue. A fix for this is expected soon."


Wow. I can't even imagine the management meetings with the IT people. 'And why cannot not the majority of our customers access more than 850 pages?' 'Don't worry, a fix is expected soon'. In a technology curve time is compressed. 'Soon' should mean later today, not the weeks it took them to even get their broken product back online. If you are spending a month fixing an old issue, the rest of the technology world leaves you behind.

And PDF format? PDF is a dead end for now, it isn't supported on many mobile devices and Google is removing default support for in the next version of Chrome.

So I suppose the next Amos warning will have a running list all the browsers that don't run the digital version?

If anyone wanted to write a book on how not to embrace technology; they should study philatelic history.
Don

Edit; Amos should be a technology leader. If they thought about it, technology moves faster than paper. In other words, a paper catalog lasts longer than a digital version. Most people will have a hard time running applications that are older than 5 years. After 10 years it becomes very difficult to run older versions of apps and operating systems. Many collectors have shelves full of older paper catalogs; some 40-50 years older or older.
As a publisher, Amos should be embracing digital versions since they represent more built in obsolescence.

Better yet, study another monopolist. The economics of the Amos business must be horrible, because no bona fide competitor has emerged in 100 years. When you don't have competition, there is no market pressure to innovate, or to release electronic products that actually work. Basically, they offer electronic products with this kind of defect because the market tolerates it and there is no incentive to do better.

Don,

For what it's worth, I am a sucker that subscribed to the 2016 eCatalog. That message has been there for months.

My Kindle has a better search function. It's horrible!

Dan

I'm new to collecting, but the whole Scott thing seems nuts.

To only publish very expensive catalogs (and a bad electronic option) that the average collector can't afford to buy every year. Then they end up losing potential revenue to the used market as many collectors will buy used copies 1-5 years old.

They could easy sell a subscription model for $9.99-$14.99 a month, eliminate the printing costs, recover the revenue from the used market and end up with more revenue and higher margins. Add in the ability for people to catalog stamps on their cloud and they'll lock in their customers for life.

Am I missing something or are they just 10-15 years behind the rest of the world?

I think Yvert and Michel offer online subscription models of this kind. Yvert's annual rate for access to the great bulk of its catalogues is around €100. I've no idea how the Yvert user experience compares with that offered by Amos, but I'd assume it would be better, based on comments above.

Amos is still stuck in the 1990s. Instead of trying to present a printed product in digital form, they need to put the data in a relational database.

There are many problems with the Internet offering. Some will take major work to fix. Since the eCatalog is nothing more than a "searchable" PDF file, it is not possible to solve a couple of important problems.

Search relevance is broken. Often the base listing for a catalog number displays last instead of first.

Multiple bookmarks: It is often necessary to flip back and forth between the Scott Valuing Guide and the base listing.

Search does not have the capability to bring related information together. For example, find all of the listings sharing the same design and display the result on one screen.

Search lacks any capability of finding "similar" information, like find all of the types of a basic design.
No ability to drill down for more detailed information in the catalog or on other sites. The usa1847 web site has more detailed information on US stamp types.

Producing a more useful product would require a modern database to store catalog information and have the ability to render eCatalog text in a more flexible format.

Imagine being able to offer an Internet product with the ability to provide prospective buyers with a few free catalog lookups or different types of subscriptions for casual users, specialists or dealers. Maybe some of the questions that clog the US Classic Stamps Mint and Used section of this board could be answered by a couple of free eCatalog query. Perhaps some of the posters would actually end up subscribing. Of course some of the less helpful descriptions of stamp sizes or perforations could be replaced with links to clearer and more helpful articles.

1. Posted on another forum, Amos is aware of the search problem and the volume is being reindexed/reuploaded.

2. The current ecatalogue is NOT a searchable PDF. The old iPad version was. In the iPad version, changing zoom would re-render vector text at the resolution level, thus preserving text quality as you zoomed in.

The current ebook version is nothing more than a bunch of static raster images tied to a back-end index; the text is not vector, thus zooming in decreases quality. The actual quality and usability of the new version is actually a step backwards. The one advantage it does have is that each volume/country is not in separate chunks. The problem with the iPad version was that you could not search across a country if that country was split in multiple parts.

But the new version cannot be used offline... and you cannot pinch zoom... both things that were promised to be improved, and neither of which have.

I wonder if this ecatalogue version is yet another temporary stopgap like the abandoned iPad version is, and at some point buyers will be left without access to purchased content as Amos moves to yet another platform/solution...

Sigh.

As sad as it is, even though I have purchased volumes in the new ecatalogue version, I only use them onscreen at home or to create printed versions of pages by taking screenshots. For shows and on the road, I still use the 2014 catalogs in the old iPad app... for as long as that remains functional.

My mistake. The product is more primitive than I thought. Only Amos would stay analog when everyone else is embracing digital. I wonder if they use hot lead to set the catalog type. Still, better indexes could be provided, but it would be a lot more work and could be error prone.

I buy the countries that I need from ChirokMD on ebay, scan them in and OCR them.

Today, I tried again to find a stamp in the 2017 US Specialized eCatalog. A search for 1053 (the $5 Hamilton) returned a number hits including the Valuing Guide, but did not return the base listing. I checked the 2016 edition and got the same result. I had been resigned to finding the base catalog listing for some stamps ranked last in search, but not finding the listing at all is not functional. Catalog number search should return the base listing first, the Valuing Guide second before collateral US listings, like the note about 1053 after Scott 497 and the possession listings in alphabetical order.

Even worse, is lack of navigation links other than the table of contents. A complete makeover is needed to make this a viable product. At a minimum, a searchable PDF file is needed. This will become even more important in a multi-volume environment where the linked information may be in another volume.

I hope someone will bring this up at the  APS "Summit on the Future of Philately"? on October 28th. I would not be surprised to find that that useful eCatalogs will be a necessary ingredient for engaging new collectors.