Future Scott Catalogues

As I understand the Yvert electronic offer, you have an annual subscription. This costs around €100 for all of their catalogues, less for bundles. That's a huge saving on the printed catalogues. But I presume that your library vanishes if you don't renew.

https://www.yvert.com/CT-1571-bibli...n-ligne.aspx

Beckett.com has gone electronic for printing sports cards (baseball, football, soccer, etc.) and charges its users a monthly or annual fee. The company still prints monthly and annual magazines. I'm sure that Scott will review an electronic option in the future.

Michel's online catalog is just a big, searchable database of catalog listings. Unlike some of the past Scott offerings where you're (theoretically) buying lifetime access to a particular electronic, PDF-equivalent of a specific year/volume of catalog, Michel's is simply a subscription allowing you to access the database. Their database isn't volume or year-based -- it's worldwide data with current catalog pricing. It also allows you to make notes and create lists. It's still got a lot of room for improvement, but it's at least a promising start for an online catalog system.

I'm not necessarily looking for an electronic Scott to save money; I'm more interested in better searchabilty, functionality and portability. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just speak into an iPad and say "go to Danzig 27a" rather than having to take a 10lb volume off the shelf and thumb through the listings until you find it? This would be a particularly huge timesaver for those who collect broad areas such as British Commonwealth, French Colonies, or the German area, etc, that are scattered amongst all six volumes. If it were subscription based and internet accessible, you'd always have a catalog in your pocket (assuming you have a smart phone). There are a million ways they could enhance the user experience of using Scott if it were fully digitized, not all of which would even have to be directly connected to the stamps themselves.

A couple of things:

1. Any claim that begins "I heard" with no other corroboration is not to be taken very seriously, I think. Heard from who? Has a responsible stamp columnist said this?

2. The examples you give are well-known examples of Scott's policy of (reluctantly) listing sand dune sheikdoms and islands with over-inflated issuing polices. Rather than wasting their time listing each and every stamp -- or removing the stamps (or countries) from the catalogues entirely (after all, people do collect this stuff) -- Scott has instead chosen to price sets rather than individual stamps. This isn't evidence of a dramatic new change suggesting that France, Britain, Japan, or the U.S. will have their stamps priced by sets. It applies to a select few countries that Scott might prefer not to list at all.

Also, for those cases where Scott prices only a whole set, I would expect that to be the primary way that those stamps are sold, rather than individually. If no dealer offers the individual stamps, how is Scott to know how to price them individually?

The absolute worst case scenario if you are working on a trade based on CV then you can pro-rate the value. I remember reading an article/post on this on another board.

Basically the formula is:

Set Value / Sum of face value of set * Face Value of Stamps

Other than lack of money, I've never quite understood why Scott/Amos didn't develop a collection inventory and a dealer inventory program. It seems a natural fit.

It's at least partly due to the fact that they license the use of Scott numbers to (17-06-18) Not Allowed - Auto-Removed and others who have developed such programs on their own; Scott doesn't want to step on their toes. Ideally Scott should partner with or buy those companies and use some of the work they've done as a starting point.

Scott did develop am inventory program but it was not that good. They were competing against existing inventory programs and their program was basic at best. Scott's program was created by an outside company. I suspect they did not want to invest more money it and they were already money off existing programs through license fees. I doubt there would be a lot of money in it until they did something online.

If Scott would simply do what Michel does with its online catalog, that in itself would be a tremendous step forward in terms of catalog accessibility for Scott among the younger generations of collectors whose lives revolve around the internet.

Just being able to look up a Scott listing via smartphone or tablet when travelling away from home would be a great convenience.