This new Scott catalogue seems very overpriced – and even at that high price, it has to be renewed annually. That's not going to work.
I'll subscribe to an online catalog if (a) it it's a reasonable price, and especially (b) if I can subscribe only to countries I'm interested in. For me, that would be maybe 25-30 countries, a not inconsiderable number of subscriptions. I only occasionally look at stamps of all the other countries, so for all of the rest of the world, I only need an older paper catalogue. My current Scott catalogues are five years old, and they're just fine.
This new catalogue they're now offering seems a product of the way Scott has always viewed things in an old-fashioned way. Maybe small-town Ohio isn't conducive to innovative thinking?
For example, Scott's old-fashioned catalogue organization system remains based on alphabetical order instead of regions. To get all the countries I collect, I have to buy every single volume of the catalogue. Consequently, I buy catalogues very rarely, and those I buy are used. If I could buy just the countries I collect, I'd buy those catalogue pages far more often.
And I do. I now buy the latest Scott catalogue pages on
ebay for each country I collect. The pages are torn out of the current catalog and sold for around $5-10 for each country. I add a cover and staple them together. They're extremely easy to use that way, much easier to handle compared to large catalogue volumes. I upgrade these every few years. Why can't Scott do this? Probably because they're used to their old system and haven't thought of it.
My favorite example of Scott being wedded to old habits has always been their basic catalogue organizing system which they adopted back in the late 19th century. Back then, Scott began organizing stamps into separate categories, regular stamps, semi-postals, airmails, and so on. Some of these made sense. After all, official stamps and postage dues aren't "postage stamps". But regular, airmail, and semi-postal stamps are all used for the same purpose. Yet they remain separated. I can use any of these stamps to mail a letter, so why aren't they all "postage stamps"? This even has the unfortunate effect of separating stamps that were issued as a set. If a set contains a few airmails, those have to be mounted separately even though they have the same subject matter and same design. It's a poor approach. One benefit of the old Minkus catalogue was that it kept these stamps together. In the Minkus way of thinking, all stamps from any year were kept together rather than in separate sections. All stamps in a set, no matter their purpose, were mounted together -- as a set -- on one album page. Not Scott, though. Scott can't change this now, but it's an example of how a 19th century decision, right or wrong, still guides their thinking despite its producing strange organizational effects.
Scott holds onto other old habits that it could change. Scott/Amos does not sell a complete set of their International Album pages organized from A-Z. It only sells pages organized by time periods. Volume I of their International Album covers 1840-1940 and must be purchased separately from all the other volumes – but now, even it is only offered as four separate "volumes". If you want your International Album with each country's pages together from beginning to end from, say, 1840-1975 (as I did) rather than mounted in a dozen or more different volumes (which seems bizarre), you're going to have to reorganize thousands of pages yourself. I did that, and it took a few weeks. I imagine Scott does this because they've always done it this way. To collect the world from 1840-1975, you need to purchase at least 10 volumes of their pages and collate all of them alphabetically yourself. You'll need a very large space (try the floor), a lot of time, and some patience. Surely, with modern technologies there must be a way to sell pages alphabetically instead of only by separate decade or year? Why not make this an option? Scott began with its chronological page system in the 19th century and has never done it any other way.
Do Scott's new digital pages function in any way as a checklist for collectors? I don't think they do. It would be useful if there were a way to mark up a digital catalogue to use when buying stamps at home or at a stamp show. I've made my own (40 page) want list for different countries. Why couldn't highlighting the stamps I need be done with an online catalogue? And if I could mark each stamp I own, why couldn't the catalogue total the value of an entire country for me? This feature might prove helpful in selling a collection. Added value like these features takes it from an ordinary catalogue to something much more useful and would help justify the annual subscription fee.
To me, Scott seems backwards-looking, doing most things the way it's always done them. Offering a digital annual catalogue subscription that few collectors will want to purchase isn't a giant leap forward. Like most collectors, I'll keep buying older paper catalogues maybe every decade or so. I do use them. For my most countries I collect, I'll keep buying separate catalogue pages on
ebay. If Scott would sell me a catalogue subscription for separate countries, I might subscribe. I don't mind paying for an annual subscription but it has to be for pages I use, at a reasonable cost -- and it would be nice if it had other features built into it that I would benefit from. Otherwise, there's little chance I'd subscribe to this expensive catalogue every year.
Posted 03/22/2022 4:57 pm
