Finally completed my type set of coins from the Ireland Republic. Album has been created(Thank you @gxseries for you help.) and is ready for viewing at: https://issuu.com/mikelarson2/docs/republic_of_ireland_coinage_1928-20 Enjoy. Be sure to view in full screen mode for best effect.
Absolutely amazing execution of this album, Mike. These albums have GOT to be catching some app developer's attention! This type of presentation could be sold as an application that one can purchase to simply enter the various parameters of coin size and placement on the page along with all the titles, add the coin images and image adornments for the covers, complete the fillable excel chart for the inside back cover information and choose the fonts and font sizes. My favorite tweak would be a "super-sized" coin image feature (lightbox), as well as a feature like PCGS' new "Video View":
Thanks, I do have a contact who was going to show one to a book publisher with the idea of making hard copy albums similar to Dansco. I haven't heard anything back from him since our last conversation. I think they would be too costly unless you were to run off many, many copies. I am not savvy enough to create an app. Interesting idea however.
Definitely much improved! Still see one coin that's a bit misaligned otherwise it's beautiful! I guess the reality is people don't want to buy an album that is going to cost around 50 - 100 dollars. But I believe there is a market for it. Some older Dansco albums have been sold for 100 - 200 USD. If you look abroad from other countries, they have been doing some very neat designs. Take for instance from Russia where they have been selling albums for Ukraine, Germany. Yes I know the audio is in Russian but the video is more than enough for you to appreciate the beauty of it. German album Ukraine album And of course, some albums on ebay https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_od...12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xalbum.TRS0&_nkw=album&_sacat=0 I believe there are Middle East albums that I posted a while back.
James, the coins are real. From my collections. The albums are digital, sort of like an ebook. I'll be happy to provide you or anyone else a PDF copy on request. Mike
The Japan Type hardcopy Dansco can be found in the $100-$200 range. Rarely. I see average 1/year on eBay. I love the idea of an app or program where you can fill in the diameters/coin order. Somehow I think all the work @gxseries does is not so simple though. It would be cool though. One additional feature (as long as we are dreaming and adding who-knows-how-much-work to our dream app) would be to make each coin photo a clickable thumbnail that opens to an individual full size screen shot of that coin. A lightbox I think it's called. Easy peasy right? Shoot though, that type of thing could work in a lot of different areas. Geneology perhaps--make a graphic of a family tree and click on an ancestor thumbnail to bring up more info. Or, a dog/horse pedigree. Or, well, lots of things. edited to add: BTW a million years ago (okay, a decade) I had contacted some album making company or other and asked about making a new Japan Type album. IIRC it was a minimum order of 5000 before they'd consider it. That was a long time ago, the company is not making albums anymore. Perhaps new technology would make this more feasible.
I'm certain that there is a big demand for Japanese goods so it is only a matter of time when a new edition comes out. I personally like my version as I didn't like Dansco's way of arrangement. Put it this way, if you wanted a quick and dirty version of a digital album, there is no reason why you cannot do it in Microsoft Word. Some of the early prototypes that I did were done that way. Some were even in pen and paper. The app is doable. I discussed this with a programmer a while back and he did not think it is hard at all. Same with the thumbnail / full screen size. The only real problem is how to auto circle crop the coin. More so for coins that are not circular. Pricing is also another challenge. If an album is around 50 dollar mark, to be price competitive - I believe most people would not want to pay more than 10 - 20 dollars for an electronic copy. Understandably with some custom albums, you may be able to ask for more regardless of hard copy or electronic version but the real challenge is to judge what people want to pay for. I'm sure with the advancement of 3D printing, cost would have gone down but the real question is "how much?" Since I live down under, it's just hard to contact any publisher / supplier other than by email otherwise I would love to see how their operations work and come up with solutions to see how to drive costs down and have a viable product. And of course, I have been going on about this for more than a decade...
