What Would You Think Of An Electronic Scott Catalog?

They will never offer the ability to make custom album pages. That will hurt the sales of their albums. They wouldn't let me use their numbers on my stamp album pages because they consider me a direct competitor and told me that the only reason they let Mystic do it is because of how much ad money they get from them.

Offering you an online collection management system where you can generate want lists and have lists and be able to share them with people online would be a huge plus. Heck they could throw in a dealer inventory system that can hook into ebay and bidStart. or create their own online selling sites.

Stamp collecting is increasingly moving online. Local stores are having a hard time staying open, but I see a vibrant community online of people actively collecting and buying/selling stamps.

Scott is still stuck in the old print world and stamp dealer model. But in 2017, I don't think they could go all digital like and I envision and recoup their costs.

I'm sure you're right that they'll never offer it, but it need not be a revenue loss for them. Album pages could be priced a la carte or through a more expensive subscription. The subscription could (and should) be several tiers. The lowest tier could maybe just give the basic listings without a lot of extra functionality. The next tier could give you the option of creating inventory and want lists, etc. The top tier could give you album pages, historical data, more specialized info, etc. And lets not forget that Amos could monetize this beyond simple subscription fees. Such a platform could still have (hopefully inconspicuous) advertisements much as the print version does. How cool would it be if you could click on a Scott# and instantly see listings of dealers selling that stamp? On second thought, they'd never do that as people could see at an instant how unrealistic catalog prices are.

Nonetheless these are all things that are possible if they had the money and the will to make it happen. I'm not sure about the money, but Amos obviously doesn't have the will. I might as well be talking about what kind of space ship I want to take to the Moon, because both are about equally likely.

Back to the electronic version of the catalog:

Regarding file sizes for downloads, the problem IMO is that in this latest incarnation of the digital catalog they took a MAJOR step backwards compared to the iPad version.

This current version presents each page as a single raster image, which (1) is useless for zooming in as both the stamp images and more importantly the text degrade in quality, and (2) is VERY space inefficient.

The majority of every catalog page is text and white space, which you don't need raster data for. The iPad version basically used a wrapper around PDFs, which were vector based rather than rasterized. What this means is that the only images were the small image thumbnails, which don't take up much space. All of the text was in vector form, which is stored as ASCII data, which is not only small, but highly compressible. Also, by retaining the text in vector form, when you pinch zoom, the text is re-rendered at the higher resolution, so there is no loss in text quality or readibility as you zoom in closer and closer.

If they are not going to move to a data-driven model, at the very least they need to shift back to a PDF-based approach, both for quality and bandwidth-optimization perspective.

Static images may be the easiest and most simple method to implement, but is the absolute WORST possible format to use for an e-catalogue.

The current version is an insulting, unusable mess for the price they charge.

One of AMOSMEDIA's mission statements.
INNOVATIVE & RESPONSIVE
Approach our markets with entrepreneurial enthusiasm and possess the agility to move quickly to adapt to the ever-changing needs of our customers and constituents.

The leadership obviously do not want to invest a lot of money in technology. They must consider it a mature business so milking the cash cow. I wonder what the ROI would be. If they cannot increase total revenue, then likely not something worth doing taking a short term view.

Well, to be fair, that mission statement was accurate when it was written... in 1935.

I think the reason why it's raster image is because of Olive Software, their vendor. I don't think Olive's eBook offering is able to support a catalog-like book, and may instead me dependent on HTML or ePub format. When Scott comes along and presents them with their catalog, I bet that Olive turned around and said "Well, we can't support this any other way than make each page an image."

Mind you, that's a guess. Amos promised offline support for their catalog in the "next version." The "next version" is not here, and may never get here.

If I had to guess, I would say that Amos probably needed to do something with the catalog on their end to make ready for Olive Software to provide an offline feature, and were unwilling to invest the time and money to do it.

I had went back and read the article about the lawsuit between Scott and Krause and one aspect of the agreement was that Scott had to be more consistent and generous in their licensing. Now, they have licensed the USPS so one would think they would be willing to license stamp inventory companies lile StampManage so they could produce online type products.

I asked Scott once about an online inventory system and they told me they don't want t compete against StampManage and (17-06-18) Not Allowed - Auto-Removed. But at the same time, they won't let those companies make an online offering, and won't do it themselves.

If they were smart, they'd just buy or just partner with stampworld or one of the other online catalogs and slide their numbering system into it. It's to their advantage to get their numbering system adopted and used by as many people as possible.

When Scott lauched v 1.0 of their digital offering (PDFs wrapped in an app), I thought that Scott could take over the catalog business. If they offered a price that was significantly below SG and Michel print, they could convince people to use the Scott Catalog instead. But they completely dropped the ball.

I'm relatively new to the world of stamp collecting, but have been around technology since the 8-bit days and this Scott model is crazy.

You have a company with more or less a monopoly printing a database on paper making it awkward and difficult to use and their attempts at going online are even worse. Then they go on to charge an annual price larger than most hobby budgets.

Scott looks a lot like Adobe was before they went to their subscription model. They'd charge $650 for Photoshop which meant people either used very old versions or pirated it. Then they went to the subscription model for $10-$25 a month. Their revenues for Photoshop more than tripled the first year. Scott could do this and they'd have trouble counting all the money that would roll in the door almost overnight. They could easily charge $15 a month and might even be able to get away with $25.

From what I have seen, it's unlikely Scott will change their model anytime soon and with their numbers embedded in every aspect of collecting in the U.S., change will be hard. But it screams for a user driven model like a StampWorld but with more participation and Creative Commons License for everything. I know this would raise a lot challenges and issues around values, but from a numbering, photo, and variation standpoint, user created information would create a database much more robust than what Scott has today.

There have been quite a number of attempts at "open-source" stamp numbering systems. None of them ever really took off. And I think a lot of it is older collectors that just don't want to change. I think that Scott would need to completely go out of business for a different US numbering system to take over.

And even if they did, their numbering system would just be sold to someone else, who may or may not perpetuate this kind of insanity.

Scott should have, at a minimum, went digital internally at least 15 years ago. My understanding is, to this day, the catalog is laid out by hand. I don't even think they have an internal database they use to track stamps. It's quite insane. I read somewhere that people PHONE IN from foreign countries to tell them about new issues of different foreign stamps. I'm sure they get emails and press releases.

If they're smart they'll have several subscription levels. Simple access to basic listings could be as low as $10 or $15 per month, but I'd expect a subscription to a fully functioning database (with all that entails) to cost $25-$30 per month or more. If the listings are searchable, sortable, and able to track inventory and want lists, etc, there would easily be enough value there to justify a $30-$50 or so monthly subscription rate (with price breaks for quarterly or yearly subscriptions). They could also sell access to countries a la carte. If they wanted to they could slice and dice access to the catalog any way they wanted.




This would make much more sense than them trying to reinvent the wheel, particularly when they apparently don't even know what a wheel looks like.



And this is why Amos probably won't change anytime soon; there simply isn't any real competition in the US market. As much as all of us sit here and grumble and wish upon a star for something better, we'll keep on buying our printed Scott catalogs.

The sad part is without a true online catalog, it will be that much harder to get the next generation into the hobby.