When I heard the 2009 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards came with a DVD, I immediately jumped online and snagged up a copy. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe I should have read a review or two. Maybe I should have spent the money on a box of Americana-II.
The book, of course, is everything the catalog has come to be known for: big, bulky, full of cards most of us never heard of let alone laid eyes on.
The DVD? It's a 165MB PDF of the book. Yes, you read that correctly. A single PDF of the book. Oh, you can use Adobe Reader to search and find, but so what? And, if you understand how optical storage devices (CD's/DVD's) work, you know that a CD holds up to 800MB of information. A DVD? Up to 8+ Gigabytes... Okay, so let me break this down for you... The PDF is 165 Megabytes. What does a CD hold? Yeah, 800MB. You could store at least FIVE COPIES of the book on a CD. Why on EARTH would you put something that small on a DVD!? Useless. Waste of space.
I guess I thought I was going to get a database version of the book. Something I could pull names and sets from. You know, something like: "Give me every Travis Hafner card from every manufacturer." Now, THAT would have been handy. Instead, I have an electronic version of a book that makes more sense to flip through the ACTUAL pages than the virtual ones....
If you are thinking about buying this because it has a DVD of the book, please save yourself the trouble and the money.
For the record, I used the "bookmarks" feature in Reader to navigate the catalog. Okay, you can jump to certain pages by using the bookmarks. That is kinda helpful. But, if you pull up the index, you cannot jump from the index back to the page with the information you want. You have to go find that yourself. Well, you can also type the page number in at the top and jump to that page. Frankly, I can do that with the paper version.... Okay, yeah, the paper version weighs a ton and takes up a lot of room on your desk (r folding chair next to your computer)... Okay, you know what? For a first time (please tell me this is the first time they included electronic media), it's not bad. Not great, and not necessarily as useful as the paper copy, but not toooooo bad....
My guess is that you can find the electronic version online somewhere if you look hard enough.
Beckett (I know, a dirty word among bloggers) had the best solution out there at one point: a database that gets update regularly based on their own cataloging. I know, you can do it online now. I'm old-school - I want the program to run on MY computer. That way, if the 'net is down, I can still enter cards into the program.
Don't get me wrong, I love the program I use (TheCardCollector), but they are missing a lot of the sets included in the Standard Catalog. I just think the Standard Catalog should have included a way for its readers to actually... ummmm.. CATALOG their cards....
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