Andy Pastuszak
Member 
Praying for my family and everyone in Ukraine.
Posts: 1,533 
What I collect: United States, Ukraine, Ireland
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Mar 25, 2022 3:14:51 GMT
PostmasterGS , one day I'll also have all my stamps IDed, sorted, and displayed in my albums. One day... Regarding SAN, there was a lot of confusion/discussion elsewhere on their membership plans. Lost in all that, is the fact that SAN offers free membership to occasional bidders. This option was always stated from day one, just not very clearly and not obvious how to get the free membership. If you are already a member, it is super easy. Just click on the free membership button, and they will email you confirmation. The free membership is for one year, and currently renewable for free. In other words, unless you are bidding on several lots from several different auctions every month, there's really no difference other than one click to get to the membership page and then another click on the free membership button. I've been a bidding member on SAN for roughly 10 years, and never paid any membership fees. It's unfortunate that an overly complicated/confusing marketing presentation got everyone all worked up & upset. It pays to be an unrelenting cheapskate -- you don't stop until you find a way to get things for free, or at least no more than 1¢.  k Every penny you save is another penny you can spend on stamps. |
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Andy Pastuszak
Member
Praying for my family and everyone in Ukraine.
Posts: 1,533
What I collect: United States, Ukraine, Ireland
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Mar 25, 2022 3:27:44 GMT
I decided to go and take a look at what Scott's new offering actually looks like, and man, is it disappointing. From the initial information in this thread, I had assumed they had finally gone to a database model. Nope. Bad on me for associating "digital subscription" with what that means for the other catalog publishers. This is still just a digital presentation of a traditional catalog. Screenshots, for those who might be interested: I signed up for the Classic Specialized. This is the initial screen I get. Thank you for saving me the trouble of subscribing and cancelling. My understanding is that Scott doesn't have a database. They're still doing stuff by hand and manually editing album pages in Adobe FrameMaker. I guarantee you MICHEL maintains a database and that database can be used to spit out some kind of desktop publishing file they can tweak and then send to a publisher. The thing is, other people have made a database of Scott numbers. Amos could buy EZStamp or StampManage and use their database. Both apps are just custom front ends to an Access database. But I don't think Scott even knows what they should do with all the data in these apps. They can't make the leap from database to printed catalog without spending money they don't want to spend. The printed catalog business may work for them now, but the generation that uses printed catalogs and doesn't want an online offering isn't going to be alive forever. And what's most annoying is they're basically giving me an eBook. But that eBook is hosted and can only be viewed online. I've emailed them repeatedly and told them that the catalog needs to be available offline, and that falls on deaf ears. If you're going to offer an online only subscription service, then it needs to be a database. If you're going to offer a searchable ebook, then it needs to be available offline. I bought the 2015 US Section on ScottOnline.com. I never use it, because it's just too cumbersome. I'd rather get pages from ChirokMD, because it provides the same experience without the hassle. I know there's a spreadsheet floating around that has the complete Scott US numbers along with a description. I think it would be cool if some people designed an app to catalog stamps that didn't have any data and was free and you could import your own data into it. The app would need to be cross platform and mobile access too. |
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djcmh
Member
Posts: 768
What I collect: Worldwide
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Post by djcmh on Mar 25, 2022 6:43:19 GMT
I know there's a spreadsheet floating around that has the complete Scott US numbers along with a description. I think it would be cool if some people designed an app to catalog stamps that didn't have any data and was free and you could import your own data into it. The app would need to be cross platform and mobile access too. Colnect at this point is pretty well complete with USA coverage in terms of the standard Scott listings, and a good amount of the Classic Specialized material. Colnect members can download the database (or any part thereof based on how they filter it) into .csv files, which includes all the technical details for the stamps, name of stamp, themes reflected in stamp design, and whatever Catalogue codes from various publishers have been assigned. Only thing not included in the downloadable .csv are images. |
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Post by PostmasterGS on Mar 25, 2022 8:33:22 GMT
I guarantee you MICHEL maintains a database and that database can be used to spit out some kind of desktop publishing file they can tweak and then send to a publisher. They do. Michel offers inventory software (MichelSOFT) that uses an Access database as the backend. It’s where I got the data for the Cost Comparison of Worldwide Collecting Areas. Due to a lack of demand (I assume), they no longer offer the Wordwide dataset, but they still release the dataset for Germany in this form. Also of note, the data in the MichelSOFT dataset was identical to that used in their online, subscription-based catalog — I could tell it was a straight port, either from Access mySQL to SQL or vice versa, because there were occasional data entry mistakes (wrong CVs, misspellings, etc.) that matched in both. |
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angore
Member
Posts: 5,335
What I collect: WW, focus on British Empire
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Post by angore on Mar 25, 2022 9:58:14 GMT
They hear you but they are surely worried about preventing sharing of the offline files. Do you recall when they decided to stop allowing downloading Linn's in PDF format when they switched online platforms? Within a few months, they reversed their decision. This is how paranoid they are.
Except for values, Colnect meets most needs. Unlike Scott, Colnect has an army of supporters. Scott would have to pay a significant amount of money to get same support and they are not going to let just anyone handle their data. This is not an excuse but a possible reason. But then Robin Harris switched his Machin site to a database.
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docphgeek
Member
Posts: 51
What I collect: PNCs, US-Definitives, Machins, BOB, Israel, Engraved
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Post by docphgeek on Mar 25, 2022 12:04:59 GMT
I am sorry if I am out of the loop, but is this a joke? Does Scott really not have a database of their data. That is almost unbelievable. That is a dinosaur waiting to go extinct.
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angore
Member
Posts: 5,335
What I collect: WW, focus on British Empire
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Post by angore on Mar 25, 2022 12:21:20 GMT
There are really two or more aspects:
Do they have a database and if so, do they use it to create the catalogs?
My opinion is they have some database to store information and images but as some say I do not think it is used to directly output to create the catalog for printing. To me, a database output would look a lot more structured.. The page count would likely increase dramatically fro aspects such as image sizing and placement so it would be done manually.. For each yearly update, most of the work is just adding new issues and revising some prices.
I have used StampManage report function to create printouts (they have a very powerful report generator) and its is hard to do anything complicated beyond basic rows and column output. If you wanted variable information for entries (not always same fields shown), insert notes not related to a stamp, and custom image sizes.. it has to be a big programming effort to tweak layouts.
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Andy Pastuszak
Member
Praying for my family and everyone in Ukraine.
Posts: 1,533
What I collect: United States, Ukraine, Ireland
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Mar 25, 2022 12:28:08 GMT
There are really two+ (or more) aspects: Do they have a database and if so, do they use it to create the catalogs? My opinion is they have some database to store information and images but as some say I do not think it is used to directly output to create the catalog for printing. To me, a database output would look a lot more structured.. The page count would likely increase dramatically fro aspects such as image sizing and placement so it would be done manually. Last I heard, they do not. Their online offering is created by a third party and they provide them either images or PDFs that they wrap a website around.
I have argued that they should either provide an eBook through something like the Apple Books or the Kindle store, or offer watermarked PDFs that have PII in them. But I don't think the format of their catalog would allow them to create a document that can reflow for different page sizes. They really need to completely redo things from the ground up.
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Andy Pastuszak
Member
Praying for my family and everyone in Ukraine.
Posts: 1,533
What I collect: United States, Ukraine, Ireland
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Mar 26, 2022 0:55:41 GMT
With all this praise for Colnect, I fell like I should get a s subscription there.
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djcmh
Member
Posts: 768
What I collect: Worldwide
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Post by djcmh on Mar 26, 2022 4:16:13 GMT
With all this praise for Colnect, I fell like I should get a s subscription there. Most of the basic features are free to access so give it a test spin and see if it would be useful for you Just note that the catalogue is not complete. All listings are based on user contributions so like any Wiki the content depends on the what users contribute. That being said, we average almost 10k new listings added each month. Much like a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece the full picture will eventually come together over the next several years. |
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Andy Pastuszak
Member
Praying for my family and everyone in Ukraine.
Posts: 1,533
What I collect: United States, Ukraine, Ireland
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Mar 26, 2022 12:25:40 GMT
With all this praise for Colnect, I fell like I should get a s subscription there. Most of the basic features are free to access so give it a test spin and see if it would be useful for you Just note that the catalogue is not complete. All listings are based on user contributions so like any Wiki the content depends on the what users contribute. That being said, we average almost 10k new listings added each month. Much like a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece the full picture will eventually come together over the next several years. I really just need Ukraine, Ireland, and the US. |
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