What Would You Think Of An Electronic Scott Catalog?

I don't buy on ebay or BidStart. So, those sites aren't an issue for me. I can't testify to Scott either taking advice or not. I know they do list contributors. On the other hand, Scott is part of Amos and the "behind-the-times" reality for Amos has been adequately discussed on other threads.

First I buy older books. I get them for a few dollars, pretty sure my USA is about 12 years old.

I would love if they offered something like Adobe does with Photoshop. You can pay just a month at a time or for a little discount a full year. They have their products in a cloud o you can access them all. PS was over $700 and I never updated to their new products ever year until I really needed to. Now I can get the new version and at first went month to month. No I just get it for a year. It's win for me and Adobe.

Scott would get far more money from me with this type of a product. Now I only buy outdated books every 10 to 15 years. Or if I need something newer I borrow one from a friend.

This is largely because of the editors' personal biases. Take the recent no-die-cut sheets that were recently issued, for example. Had they been issued back in the 30's, they'd have been given major numbers on the spot without so much of a second thought. As a matter of taste, today's editors didn't think the USPS should have issued those imperfs, so they wouldn't even give them a minor number at first. It was only after much discussion on the issue that they would give them anything more than a footnote.

As a worldwide collector, my beef with Scott's numbering system is that it needlessly scatters too many stamps in the catalog listings that actually belong together. Scott's numbering system actually works pretty well for the US, with very few semi-postals and airmail issues that are separate and distinct from regular issues. But many countries issued sets that included airmails (C), semi-postals (B)and/or airmail semi-postals (CB). Having a single set scattered in 2, 3 or even 4 sections of the catalog is aggravating, and albums based on Scott do the same, of course. I can see why postage dues and officials and other back-of-the-book listings need their own section, but I wish they would at least list airs and semis alongside regular issues. It's a much more logical layout for most countries.

Artful, the issue of scattering stamps that logically belong together is not unique to Scott's. For example, Michel routinely breaks up sets and reprints based on date of issue. Gibbons gives major numbers to many sets that are reprinted with new watermarks vs. Scott who generally lists watermark changes as minor numbers, at least for Commonwealth.

Along your line of thinking, what I find irritating about Scott is the inconsistency in their approach. In some cases Scott's will put sets issued over several years together by using "A" and "B" numbers while in other cases (especially the last 10-20 years) Scott splits the sets up in order of when they were issued. Monaco to me is a mess in this way. Several definitives were issued over a long period of time, for example the 1939 Scenes definitive continued into the late 1950s, and for some time ran concurrently with the Ranier definitives that started in 1955. The Ranier definitives ran into the early 1970s, and overlapped with a much shorter definitive showing views of the Palace that started in 1960.

All these issues are scattered all over the listings for Monaco. Given that these series all ended almost 50 years ago, it's frustrating that Scott hasn't reorganized Monaco into something more helpful to the collector. Scott did this with Great Britain Machins, eventually opting to move all the Machins into a separate section. And Scott renumbered all of the Ceres issues from the Portuguese colonies.

Oy vey.

Has anyone tried the USPS offerings? They sell a Guide to US Stamps stamp app for $9.99. I assume it is based off their printed book.

Good write up apastuszak.

Scott's catalogs that were offered on disk were pirated and sold more copies than Scott's (Amos) did so they shut it down. Most of the pirating was done in India and the Slavic reasons of Eastern Europe. I loved them on disk and still have them loaded on my hard drive for reference. ebay was the pirates favorite place to sell them at the time.

Being a Program Manager and Cyber Security Subject Matter Expert with 25 years of IT and Cyber experience at that time (2009) I offered to give them some free advice as to disk security, web beacons, tracking pirates, etc... but they were about as technical as my grandmother and didn't have any interest. A shame because I really liked the ability to get digital copies.

I recently looked into their new digital catalogs but was dismayed to find out that it's locked down. You have to be on line to view, can't save them to your local drive and although I'm not certain (and they had no clue what I was asking) they are probably using a type of Flash driven web catalog. In order for legitimate users to save a page it's a screen shot at a time. I haven't tried the 'demo' and don't intend to.

I like having things local so I can work off line. Heck, I even scan/photograph then OCR any books I buy so I can have them on my local drive for my own use. After that they sit on the shelf never again touched. See: https://www.diybookscanner.org/ (Great resource) I don't take the time to scan catalogs though.

Another kick is that, after you "buy" the digital version from Scott's you can only view it for 3 years! But at the same time they say it's not a subscription.

No dice for me. I'll stick to buying a two year old catalog every 2-3 years. It's much more affordable that way, and I'm cheap. I'd prefer to spend on my stamp budget mostly on stamps. Heaven help us (and them) if they ever decide to go this way and dump paper...

Jeff

Jeff,
Given your background, you are no doubt aware of the issues surrounding implementing a stamp catalog client side application like you describe. But I did not see your opinion on the solution for these issues.
1. Putting tens of thousands of high resolution images on a user's local device means very big install/downloads (bandwidth and consuming storage space) which might be a mobile device without large amounts of storage.
2. Anytime there is a new revision of the software the cost, time, and support required to goes up exponentially when you have to apply this across thousands of user's devices (as opposed to doing it once on a server only based application).

Do you have solutions in mind that addresses these significant concerns?
Don

My understanding is that Slavic regions use MICHEL primarily and India uses Stanley Gibbons, since they're Commonwealth. So, Scott was not losing any customers over this. Plus the cost of shipping a Scott catalog to Eastern Europe or India would probably cost more than the catalog itself does.

apastuszak - Your comment about India and Eastern Europe as it pertains to which catalog those folks use for collecting is well taken. I interpreted jconey's post to mean that the copying of the electronic Scott catalogs occurred in these countries and were resold again electronically on places like ebay. I've seen these items frequently on ebay, but not in printed format.

shermae, yes you got it.

apastuszak - I wasn't talking about collectors in those regions. Sorry if my meaning wasn't clear. That was where the copies were probably made but the distribution point was traced to. Particularly for ebay sales. Having said that it doesn't mean locals in that area were automatically involved as they are frequently hijacked by others. However, in this case it did seem to trace back to actors in those area.

Jeff

I had a discussion with Amos about that. They indeed had an issue with ebay sellers selling fake CDs they made to unsuspecting collectors they thought were buying the real thing.

I know of place right now where I can download the entire 200o9 catalog if I wanted to.

Don, Yes there are realistic options for mobile use, which correct me if I'm wrong is a focus for you. Previous discussions with Amos were pertaining to distribution on disk and PC/laptop use. Both being deep subjects and probably a bit deep for this venue. I'll give it some thought and see if I can pass some info to you, here or otherwise. This weekend is tight and I expect to run late nights for the next week or more.

With your background I would think you'd have a few ideas yourself. We should compare notes sometime.

Jeff

I don't think there are realistic options for mobile use. Amos's catalog is online only. Each page is a picture, as opposed to editable text with graphics. I can't even imagine how much space a full book would take up if each page is a picture.

The 2009 Volume 1 PDF that Scott properly generated is 270 MB in size. And that's just one volume. To save that as an image per page is probably just HUGE.

The problem we have is that Scott should have probably started on this 20 years ago. Databases were a thing since the 80s. The could have easily collected stamp data into a simple database years ago, even in the DOS days. But they chose to stay a print only publisher.

The thing is, there are any number of online sites out there now that have done a wonderful job of creating an online catalog. Their only problem is, they can't use Scott numbering, because Scott won't grant them a license.

I know there have been quite a number of attempts at creating a copyright free numbering system for all to use. And the systems never gain traction. The hard part is that Scott, like any system sequentially numbers stamps based on the order they were issued, with other oddities thrown in. That's a pretty simple numbering system. But it's a system Amos legal protects, because it's really the only IP that they have that is of any value. If someone else were to list the first 10 US stamps and number them 1 through 10 in their system, then Amos legal could come after them. So, numbering systems also have some convoluted system to avoid copyright infringement, such as adding the year to the stamp name, so Scott 1 becomes 1847-1, something slightly more annoying to use.

The electronic version of Scott that I envision is an online, subscription based model, with all the functionality one would expect in 2017. It should be searchable and sortable by any field, allow you to build inventory and want lists, etc, and even build custom album pages. Every stamp should be pictured and prices could be updated in real time. It should be accessible from any web browser on any device with internet access. Some data - such as inventory and want lists, should be exportable to Excel or some other external app. Their recent offerings offer none of that - they're little more than pictures of the printed catalog. I could be enticed to pony up for a subscription with just some of the functionality I mentioned, but I'm not interested in pictures of the printed catalog, at least not at the price they charge for it.

Just out of curiosity, I took the Scott 2009 Volume 2 PDF and converted it to JPEG using Adobe Acrobat. The JPEGs it made were about 1 MB in size and the resolution was far too low to be useful in any way. The size of all the files together came to 1.2 GB in size. So, the image files, ad bad resolution is 5 times the size of the PDF. Assume you need to double that to get any kind of decent resolution and you've hit a huge unsustainable size for offline use.

And when I look at the 2009 catalog, it was generated using Adobe Distiller. So, someone, in whatever app they used, when to File->Print and choose the Adobe Distiller printer drive and printed. The app didn't even have an option to export to PDF.

I fear Scott is just too far behind the times to get where they need to be digitally. All they have left are old collectors who don't want to go digital, and a numbering system they can collect royalties off of.