Pirated Krause

It is copyrighted material and it IS illegal to scan and sell copies of it. Use your best moral and ethical judgment to see if you want to get one of these. It's up to you

Krause now has a 3 CD version of their world coin books. 1801-1900, 1901-2000 and 2001 to date, for $99

I could do without the prices, as many of them are off anyway, but good point on the mintage figures. I never noticed that they weren't there. I guess they weren't that important to me so far. LOL

Spica brings up a good point. I have used the Krauses ever since they came out with them and never minded that "up to date" usually means a few years lag time.
Are there other reference catalogs that are as good or better than Krause for world coins? Not just specific countries, but all countries (or most of them) under one cover?

It is a huge undertaking to catalog all the coin types from the last few centuries in the entire world, and Krause has overall done a remarkable job. There is bound to be some weak coverage of certain areas. Send them an email and help them out if you find a mistake or missing information.

Everyone asks about Krause values as if they are meaningful; in today's fast-moving market they are not. Relative values within a series, for the most part, are still meaningful. Consider though, that the Krause catalogs have in large part helped MAKE and DRIVE a healthy market in world coins, and brought them into the mainstream. Without the catalogs, I doubt prices would have moved up so quickly.

Pirated electronic copies of works like this should be resisted. Krause deserves to be fairly compensated for the huge amount of work which goes into making these catalogs. If it is good enough to steal, it is good enough to pay for.

The problem with Romania and other eastern countries is that people don't even know that they're doing something illegal by using copyrighted materials. Every single young boy here is taught to copy CDs with games and download movies or music from the local network believing this is the natural way and having a little shock when seeing first time an original game in a shop costing about 40$. That boy would usually think WOW!I can get it from the internet for free!This is because children don't realize that they're actuelly steeling, and they grow like this, and then everybody does it.Of course the economical state of the Romanian society is contributing to this.Families with 2 or 3 children having a monthly income of less than 200$ is not unusual here.And then, there's a lack of shops and providers of original materials, which can be found in only 5 towns or so and which provide the materials at an absolutely unafordable price for the average Romanian. For example, the 2005 Krause was sold in the numismatic club from Bucharest for 260$ even though it had a price of 100$ printed on the backcover.They said that it was because of the shipping taxes.I bet that in Romania less than 5% of the materials are licensed and original. So the EU will have a hard time reducing piratery.
t360, I'm currently searching for a free source of pictures of Romanian coins (hope I already found it!) to send to Krause and of course information and everything.

That as well applies to many other countries whose income is just merely a few hundred dollars. After paying all the utilities bills, food, transportation, etc, it just makes it ridicious to spend a sizable proportions of money on a catalogue.