The new Scott Online Subscription Service

I should have mentioned that.

All old purchases are still available (for now).

But going forward, if you want to buy a Scott digital catalog, you can't. You can only subscribe.

I'm not sure who's steering the ship there, but they're obviously clueless when it comes to a digital offering.

The place just made me a ChirokMD customer for life.

ALSO...

I used to be able to buy individual countries on scottonline.com. Now you have to subscribe to a whole volume now.

Have I mentioned www.colnect.com ?

Yes thankfully. I purchased a full set of digital Scott catalogues at the end of 2020 (2021 editions, including classic Specialized) so I am at least good for several more years before needing to consider updating at least the Classic Specialized.

Hopefully by then Scott will learn some marketing 101 and re-evaluate its price structure compared to the similar offerings Michel and Yvert have but which charge US$400-450 per year less (and for what are in my opinion in many ways better worldwide catalogues, especially Michel).

Their awful iOS app was just an encrypted PDF reader.

What they need to do they refuse to do. They need a database, not a catalog.

I don’t want to flip through pages. I want to go in and tell the site to show me all Scott Major numbers that came out in 2011with pictures and other details such as perforation and die-cut information. And I want an app for my phone and tablet with full offline access.

Instead they’re offering me a better search experience and more stamp pictures, neither of which I need.

Scott needs to do what Colnect does.

I would not count on it anytime soon.  They have not done well with their digital offerings such as their stamp inventory program and then later selling PDFs that were duplicated and being sold.  They also sell countries catalogs alphabetically rather than grouping in more logical ways. 

As the saying goes, the amosadvantage website is slow as molasses.  The search is crude.

I suspect they do not view Michel as a key competitor since they believe most of their customers do not use Michel.  Most dealers sell using Scott.  I am sure their focus is to replace the drop in printed sales with digital sales - revenue neutral at worst.  This shows how much of the selling price is not the printed book itself.

I do not see a need for new catalogs every year or even 5 years (my set is 2016/2017). I do not collect new issues and the values really do not change much.   If I wanted a new set I would get a 2 or 3 year old set for a substantial price reduction of the every increasing cost new ones. 

Colnect is my go to source for identification and this is what I need a catalog to do. Printed catalogs are not 100% illustrated.  I have found very few errors on Colnect.

At some point, I am going to pull pages and scan them.

I think Scott could help themselves and the US hobby better if they gave up on the ridiculous notion that their data is somehow worth 750 dollars a year. They should find a way to customize their data for customers and sell them convenience and accuracy while licensing their numbering system to more 3rd parties. Grow the hobby. Sell a million $1 widgets instead of relying on small numbers of collectors to pay exorbitant prices.

From previous communications from Scott, I have learned 2 things:

1. Scott is super-paranoid about piracy.  At one point they had a full-time guy who did nothing but report eBay auctions for selling illegal copies of the Scott DVDs
2. Scott won't do anything that will annoy their advertisers or licensees. They won't make an online inventory system, because they license their numbers to StampManage and EZStamp.
3. Their in-house system for generating the catalog is super-primitive. As fas as I know, they're still manually editing the catalog in Adobe FrameMaker. So, the only online offering they're capable of doing is something they can suck out FrameMaker and dump into another tool.

I would love to check out their new catalog subscription, just to see the UI. But I guarantee you that it will just be a virtual book where you can turn the pages. I really don't want to give them $100 and then have them refund it.

My other issue is, I don't use one catalog for all my collecting. I use Scott for US.  I use MICHEL for Ukraine, and I use Stanley Gibbons for Ireland. And those are the only 3 countries I collect.

In 2022, I should be able to buy just the countries I need and download them as PDFS, look them up in a database, or order them as print-on-demand book.

I had looked at exporting information from Colnect and seemed like the catalog numbers were all in the same field.

It would be great if you could create sell, trade, want lists on computer from a spreadsheet and then upload but my guess it could be a mess if someone did not get the fields right (invalid data).

Isn't SAN just a convenience solution? You can bid directly with houses as well. Right?