The disappearance of printed manuals
Comments: 6
When I bought the upgrade to BBEdit 8 (8.01 is out now), I ordered the CD in the hope that, unlike version 7, a printed manual would be included. The UPS fellow just delivered the box and, nope, no printed manual.
So I’m using BBEdit 8, but the collection of manuals on the bookshelf peters out at version 6. Not good!
I really can’t stand this trend toward not including printed manuals with software (I’m picking on Bare Bones here but it’s a common failure these days). When you get tired of looking at a screen, you can take a manual off the shelf, start browsing by way of having a rest, and still feel that you’re being constructive. You can scribble notes in a printed manual, bookmark them with pieces of torn up sales receipts, read them standing up on the train, and throw them at the wall when sticky problems don’t resolve easily. None of which is possible with PDF manuals or online help, no matter how good it is.
How about something like this: do a deal with Kinko’s whereby a voucher included in the CD packaging allows me to go into any Kinko’s and walk out with a spiral-bound B5 (or even A4) manual. I’d have to trek into town to find a Kinko’s, but at least I’d have something worthwhile to read on the train coming home.
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Posted to General Rants • 2004.09.26 (Sun) • 10:22
Comments
Posted by cf 2004.09.26, 11:19
Ha! This is pretty interesting… Last week I ordered BBEdit 8.0 from barebones and requested physical shipment… because “I wanted a manual” The box came….. seems lite….clunk, clunk….hmmmm sounds like alot of empty space in this box…
yup a big over-sized box with a cd in it…..
I whole-heartedly agree with you, I’m one who underlines, highlights, scribbles, and bends pages double front and back….I dont see this getting any better as it seems the “in” thing to do now and saves the company a ton of money, which (lets continue to pick on bare bones) they DEFINETELY don’t pass on in savings to the customer….bbedit being double the cost of homesite….too bad homesite never made it to mac..
Posted by Lea de Groot 2004.09.26, 13:00
Yep, if all I wanted was the software, I would download it from the net and burn my own backup. If I go so far as to order backup media directly, I’m expecting something More for my dollars I think - even if they do want to charge me an even higher fee for the dead tree version. Although there is nothing stopping us from printing out the pdf and taking that to Kinkos (I assume there are shopfront printers?) for binding ourselves - and some of these business will print and bind from the pdf for us! Mirabule Visu! :)
Posted by Mary Beth 2004.09.26, 13:16
Love the kinko’s voucher idea. Most people would never take advantage of it (saving the software company some dough) but those who want a paper version have a way to get one.
If the software companies wanted to be really slick they would provide two version of manual. One would be viewable on the screen as they provide now.
The other would be formatted so when you print it out it’s a half sheet format. the pages would be properly arrayed so that Kinkos prints it out, cuts it in half, flops the two halves together and binds it - instant small book for the bookshelf. Can you tell I don’t like letter-size paper manuals very much?
Posted by Derek 2004.09.26, 15:35
TidBITS had a good article on this several years back: “The Death of Documentation.”
Posted by danbee 2004.09.27, 04:59
It’s not just software it would appear. A friend of mine bought a Konica Minolta Dimage camera and the manual is in PDF format on a CD.
Posted by Craig Beck 2004.09.28, 15:03
Damn. I ordered v8 expecting a manual too. It hasn’t arrived yet.
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