Did Anyone Else Notice That The Scott Catalog App Is No Longer In The Ios App Store?

So, do you think that Amos knows their market, and their market does not want an electronic offering?

I'd love to make a crowdsourcing effort to make a true electronic database of stamps that allowed me to search by Scott number, was available offline and allowed me to catalog my collection.

Problem is, Amos' lawyers would be all over my *** faster than I could blink for violating their "copyrighted" numbering system.

I'm pretty sure you can't copyright a sequential numbering system. But the problem is, someone would need to let Amos take them to court and bear the legal expense to get a ruling in their favor.

TBH, I am not sure what Amos would do if there was a court ruling that their prized numbering system cannot be controlled by them. I would think everyone under the sun that licenses the numbering system would suddenly stop paying Amos.

I am not sure they want to invest the money on a true online offering with an uncertain return on investment. Their track record has not been good for various reasons.

Some may believe an online price will be significantly cheaper but Amos still prices the ecatalogue at $75 compared to the printed at around $100 net. I wonder if you purchase an ecatalogue do you get access forever like you would with a printed book.

This I can understand. But it's my understanding that they won't license the numbers to a third party to develop a system either.




You do, as long as Amos has a digital offering. Their eCatalog is completely online. There is no way to pull it local. So, if the online copy goes away, so does your catalog.

The old app was offline. So, that app went away, but I could still access my catalog.

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The role playing game industry went through similar pain with their ebook offerings. Most publishers have settled on watermarked PDF files. You basically buy a PDF and, at the time of purchase, they insert a bunch of personally identifiable information into the PDF that's hidden, and each page also has your name and order number in a small font in one of the bottom page corners. This is a solution I really like, because it gives me the book as a PDF that I can use anywhere, but it also introduces enough info that if I "share" the book online it can be tracked back to me.

Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons, went a different route. They outsourced the whole thing to a third party that made an online offering and apps for both Android and iOS.

PDFs are problematic on mobile devices. And no security scheme prevents conversion of the PDF to an image file and then back to a PDF. In my opinion the direction should be an online SQL database.
Don

As long as it has offline access, I think that's a great idea.

If nothing else, Amos should talk to Amazon. They're a whole business around digital textbooks for college students. I'm sure some of that expertise could help Amos make a good eCatalog.