My semi-annual Scott Catalog rant

I complained to them as well about their iPad offering. It was abysmal! They emailed me back saying thanks & they'll look into it, but they never did. I'll never buy all those softcover catalogues! They lost a paying customer when they abandoned their pad app - I would have been hooked on that!

I know I'm a Michel homer, but Scott could really learn a thing or two from them.

In addition to their hard-copy catalogs, Michel now offers:

1. An online, database-driven catalog that is completely searchable, and is kept relatively up-to-date. It also has a rudimentary system that allows you to mark entries and add them to a list.
2. Online e-books of their catalogs.
3. PDF copies of their catalogs on USB sticks.
4. Create-your-own catalog, either in hard copy or on USB stick.
5. A website that allows you to take a photo on your phone and have it search the catalog for a match.
6. Cataloging software.
7. Album software that's integrated with the catalog data.

If it weren't for the language barrier, they'd dominate (though they are publishing more English-language versions these days).

Scott's alphabetical arrangement is the #1 reason I don't buy new Scott catalogs more than about once a decade. I collect a very narrow area, but would have to buy all the volumes to cover that area. Again, not to beat the Michel horse to death, but their catalogs are all either geographical (Eastern Europe, Caribbean Islands, etc.), or topical (cats, dogs, trains, etc.).

Rant away...it can't hurt & hopefully you'll feel better??!!?

This discussion is the definition of 'beating a dead horse'  - as it has all been said, over several decades already...

Amos sells horses. If they make you a car, you won't want to buy their horses anymore! Like all of their contemporaries in the publishing world, they are dying a slow & painful death. 

Eventually, after they die, their copyrights & trademarks will expire, or someone will buy them. At that point, a 20 yr old computer science student could deliver what we all want with ease. 

I don't expect many of us - if any of us?! - will be around to see this...

Our market is too small to force change. Thus, a monopoly continues to stifle competition & innovation. 

I have found the search for adequate/acceptable  catalogue materials to to be  a challenge. As I do not collect moderns" , It would seem an easy task to just find/buy older references.... but, as I  (and many others I am sure  ) have found,  many references are lacking in various ares of detail, and many do not "agree" with each "other".... France coming immediately to mind.....

In some ways, a philatelist, must also become a research librarian!

Hi Stan

Collecting only 3 countries I have found that the general catalogs do not suffice.  One has to obtain catalogs published in the country itself.  I will say that if one is word wide it is an impossibility.  However, I have found that most WW collectors have a "pet" country or two.  Then specialized catalogs for a country or two is possible.

Jerry B

I'm lucky, I mainly only need the SG Commonwealth 1840-1970 catalogue which I buy every two years. Other catalogues I need I borrow from local libraries or consult when I (or used to) visit the Royal Philatelic Society in London. Personally I much prefer to browse though a real catalogue than using a pdf viewer or similar, though searching for stamp descriptions is obviously better when done electronically. The SG specialist catalogues, though not printed every year, are very good.

The Scott 2009 catalogue on pdf was a big mistake as it became widely available on the internet to download for free. Perhaps they are still consious of this.

Actually, they did have TOC/Index from the get-go, as I bought the Scott digitized catalogs early in the game back in 2005.   But the index was just the same as the print catalog index, and not "clickable".  If I remember correctly, the installer would even put in a front-loading navigation page (which I hate). So I ended up extracting the pdfs individually so I could open up what I needed directly from Windows.

The 2008 DVDs required registration to activate. Fine, I understand. But when I change laptops, I have to re-register; how long with they support re-registration? Congratulations, you just opened the door for forcing people to get hacked files.

The 2009 DVDs were just totally annoying. By disabling the print function (I was printing specific catalog pages as needed in gray-scale to make notes and mark special inventory), they pretty much forced me to get hacked files so I could print a couple of pages. I understand their concerns, but it pretty much killed the product as it forced people to hack or purchase pirated files -- in other words, they shot themselves in the foot, again.

If your pdf files are missing or having corrupted bookmarks, the file is hacked/pirated. The original files have clean bookmarks.

Hi angore

The library I need is the National Library in Bogota, Colombia    I can do some research with Google books but, not enough.
That is more than obvious!!  Some companies are cheap.  They hire people who have no experience and haven't a clue of what to do or how to design a system.  Somebody, like myself, is going to cost them way more then the 50K-60K they offer.  The developers hired  should go to a "design" school.  I worked as a consultant for IBM (not as an an employee).  I had to go to a week or two of school to learn how to design and test projects their way.  Just think us old geezers built a whole lot on slooow 8K - 32K machines.

Jerry B

Interesting discussion. I used to work in directory publishing on the software side - and it all was data driven at our tiny company in the 1990s. In fact, one of my jobs was designing the system to pull out the right data from the database & applying styling so it could render properly in the desktop publishing software we used. I was 25 at the time and definitely not the most experienced developer around, and it wasn't that difficult. So if Scott truly doesn't have their listings in some kind of backend database that is truly astounding in this day and age - they've only had the past 30 years or so...

For my identification needs, I use a combination of Scott Classic, specialized catalogues for a few areas of interest (Unitrade for Canada, Yvert/Maury for my French colonies, Michel for German) and then ezStamp for the other stuff - anything post 1940 world wide. It's pretty accurate and fairly fast to use. I found it too cumbersome for inventory purposes, but for looking up stamps it works well. On occasion I'll use stampworld too. I would never buy a Scott WW catalogue - full of useless dross and horribly organized. If anything I'll probably pick up some more Yvert or Michel cats - like them both & and you can buy many of them for the same amount of money as the Scott WW.

Now that I have both the Zumstein for Switzerland/Liechtenstein and Hibernian for Ireland, I realize how inadequate Scott really is.

Wow, I didn't know they were discontinuing the Hibernian. Thanks for the heads up!