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Ask Slashdot: Why Does Almost Nothing Come With a Proper Printed Manual Anymore?
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: As someone who grew up with 1980s and 1990s computers and electronics and still has whole boxes of lovingly prepared printed computer, peripheral, game and software manuals from that era, I am continually surprised by how just many products ship without a proper printed manual these days. Case in point would be things like Android phones. Android has quite a few not-entirely-obvious functions built into it. And a lot of people aren't even aware they exist. No Android phone I've bought has ever had a printed manual included in its little product box. Not even a small one. Even expensive laptops ranging in price from 2,000 to 5,000 Dollars often come only with a few sheets of printed paper in the box -- warranty card, where to register the device, URL for downloading drivers and so on. Why is this? It can't be environmental concern -- the electronics devices themselves, when thrown away, are a hundred times (if not worse) more harmful to the environment than a little 50 to 100 page recycled paper booklet would be. So where are the manuals? Is it the cost of preparing the manuals? The cost of printing them? Is it a few grams of extra weight added to the product box? Is everyone supposed to look up everything online now, even in places where there is no internet connection? And why can't there be a print manual option -- e.g. pay 3 to 5 Dollars extra, and get a full, printed manual you can study on a couch?
Seriously, that's a fucking retarded question to ask and you don't deserve an answer.
It means they or someone else can sell it separately.
Manufacturers are not interested in creating users who know what they are doing.
Designers tend to be of the persuasion that if it needs a manual, it isnt user friendly enough, and writing one anyway makes them look like quitters.
Users themselves just want a black box with a go button that takes them to pleasureville.
Why is this even a question. When a company does not include something it's because they are trying to save money. Even offering a servi e to print the manual for you means they will have to spend money on things to do that.
Just get a tablet and load all your manual/pdfs on that.
Seriously Slashdot, do you let these posts through because you have nothing better to do?
They add bulk, cost and can't be updated. You may think each one is cheap individually but the costs add up when you have to print millions or billions of them.
Why print it when nobody reads it anyway?
Nintendo stopped shipping printed manuals with most their games. They cited reducing unnecessary waste as the primary cause. They don't omit the manual though. Every product comes with a built-in e-manual now, and this allows them to specifically design and format the manual content for built-in software readers. In an era of mobile gaming, nobody wants the manuals to take up physical space.
They've made their product packaging much smaller too, but so have most the other game publishers in recent years.
The internet is free. I find it easier to google the manual online than find the one that came in the box with the product. Next question...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"The reason to move on: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us."
Back in my days we had PRINTED manuals!!
Yes, devices came with thick, detailed manuals back then. People also typically didn't read those manuals. The vast majority of people either just stumbled their way through "figuring it out" or avoided the product entirely as being overly complicated.
These days, more work has gone into product design to make things intuitive so that people can just "figure it out" easier rather than providing the manual that will go unused anyways. At most things will typically come with a "Quick Start Guide" to give you the most basic of instructions to get the device up and going - and for the most part that's what the market wants.
Those manuals cost money - both to print and to pay someone to write in the first place. Offer the same product on the shelves - one without a manual and one that costs $5 extra that includes it. I'd wager quite a few dollars that the one without the manual will outsell the one that includes it 20 to 1.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The last few laptops I have gotten game with electronic manuals. They were nicely formatted, complete, on the usb stick that came with the laptop so I could view it offline along with a complete set of drivers and other recovery information.
I much prefer electronic manuals to paper ones.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I'm usually irritated if I ever have to crack open a manual, which is almost never. What is this guy studying on the couch? Does he read manuals like it's a novel?
To find out why your smartphone won't connect to the internet, just connect to the internet to download the manual telling you why you can't connect.
What could be simpler?
Just not computers. Considering the typical computing device product cycle, it's unlikely that a printed manual would be both reliable and useful by the time the customer opens the product and loads the first update over the net. Plus contextual help on anything with a reasonably sophisticated UI is probably more helpful, anyway.
Yes. That is what you are supposed to do. What is the point of a printed manual for a whiz-bang piece of tech like an Android phone or $2000-$5000 laptop when there is no internet connection? Maybe such tech is still useful without the connection, but that is a tiny minority of use cases. That tiny minority does not justify the expense of preparing, printing, and distributing manuals.
A more common use case would be this: a manufacturer goes through the expense of preparing, printing, and distributing manuals with their product. Then, after all that effort, 75% of end users never even open it. Of those that do open it, most will never reference it later on. A tiny fraction of users will reference several times during the life of the device. Some users will look at the printed manual, puzzle over the table of contents, and wonder where all the hyperlinks are. What, no search tool? Another thing to consider is currency: hardware and software changes often, and probably as soon as the manual was prepared and published, some of the information in it would be dated, misleading, incorrect, or otherwise out-of-sync with reality. Keeping a soft copy up-to-date (like an online support page) is much easier.
It's just another way the world was better in the 1980s.
I disagree. Every piece of hardware I own, TV, soundbar, laptop, game console, etc., has a proper, downloadable PDF manual with lots of good info in it. Most are well written and designed.
If, say, LG anticipates selling 20,000 of a certain model of TV, the costs of physically printing and shipping all those manuals is significant. They don't have their own printing plant so when I say cost, I mean the cost of printing and shipping the manuals to LG HQ.
Plus the argument that 99% of people immediately throw that away, which is true, has to factor in.
Overall it's just a waste of time, energy, money and little chunks of our planet for something that even us old guys in 2018 get online if we need it.
If you're buying a piece of hardware and it doesn't have a proper manual available online, you're buying garbage.
Just buy an iPhone, it needs no manuals, even 80year olds can use them.
Cost and lack of a general need. Who reads manuals? Really, who reads manuals that cannot download one?
Consumer products today should be produced with the aid of UX experts and UX studies, so that they are intuitive enough that manuals are not required. Features that are too advanced to be understood without the assistance of a manual should never be compulsory to use, and regarded as customizations for expert users who will research themselves.
No product these days should ever require a manual - we have the tools available to make it possible to produce products intuitive enough that manuals are unnecessary. If you'd like some help learning about it yourself, I suggest you read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" and Don Norman's books for more extensive advice. If your everyday consumer product requires a manual, you're a failure as a designer. The only exceptions to this are really, crazy advanced products, and even then a lot more could usually be done to make them easier to use.
If you want a book on Android, you can buy several, there's no shortage.
Check out the winner of this years Ignobel prize in Literature: Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
Software updates that add and/or remove features quickly make the printed manual you got with the item obsolete.
can read more than 140 characters on a single subject any longer.
Manuals are printed at a cost to the manufacturer, placed in the box by a worker paid by the manufacturer, adds weight to the package shipped by the manufacturer, and potentially ends up going missing at a replacement cost to the manufacturer. The more of those boxes they can pack into a shipping container from China the lower their costs will be.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
First, most people have seen or used something similar to what they have purchased. This was not true when computers/software... was first available.
Second, the printed material was probably already outdated when it was originally printed, much more so when updates to the software/microcode have been made.
Third, the lack of enough (good) translators that can actually take the original language and make enough sense of it and carry that over to other languages.
Fourth, If something is simple enough to use without a manual, why bother printing one?
Fifth, Search engines with access to Online manuals and support group sites, combined with phone/email support can answer most questions. If you need detailed information, the answers a click away.
Someone has to write it, edit it, translate it, print it, pack it, ship it, unpack it, put it in the box that has to be enlarged to allow it to fit, ship it again, and for what? 90% of consumers won't even read it. It will go straight into a bin (a recycling bin if lucky, most likely just into landfill trash). So not including it is a cost savings and environmental savings. Think about it this way, in Q1 2018 there were 383,503,900 smartphones sold worldwide. If each one came with a 200 page manual, that's 38,350,390,000 pages (100 double side printed pages per manual) of paper essentially wasted. Now let's assume it's about A6 size paper. That's around 1.41g per sheet, so 54,074,050 kg of paper, not including covers. All for just 3 months worth of phones. Now extrapolate that out for a decade. And that's just for phones.
A better solution would be to include a manual on the device (for phones and laptops). You would at least save the cost of producing and shipping the physical manuals. Even so if you really need it, you can usually find setup and service manuals for laptops on the vendor website. Phones, well... There's always the For Dummies books.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Or at least, it should be. http://www.atarimania.com/docu...
Printing is costly and if I want to search for a specific term, give a copy to a friend, keep an archival copy, or load one on to a mobile device: I want the electronic version
Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
https://academic.oup.com/iwc/a...
I prefer PDFs that I file when I can find them easily. A second advantage is that most manuals have multiple languages. I can split the PDF and make one that has only the pages I want.
Printed manuals for electronic gear always did suck to varying degrees. It's true that back in the nineteen hundreds when machines like the Altair and Commodore were aimed at the hobbyist market, the writing was nerd-to-nerd rather than by the illiterate Chinese peasants who wrote the manuals for other electronics.
Computer manuals have never been the worst. Try deciphering a camera manual sometime. After you invest in a new Kosmo-Kazac 5000 and are immediately lost in a maze of twisty little menus, all alike, you may be tempted to reach for the manual, which quaintly still comes in printed form. But you're better off with the PDF, which you can (1) display at a readable font size and (2) represents the current revision, rather than the one that was in print that day in Sichuang when the box was sealed.
But experienced photographers know that they'll be still better off when a third-party guidebook called something like "Mastering The Kosmo-Kazac 5000" comes out. It will explain not only what each menu item means and how they interrelate, but but will tell you what settings are important for different kinds of photography. The guidebook, not the manufacturer manual, is what you will keep, well-thumbed, in your camera bag for the life of the device. And in a field with hardware so complex today that lenses have their own firmware updates, only a good third-party guide will tell you whether bringing the Exorbitar 24mm prime is a good choice for today's shooting with this particular camera.
Having created numerous products during my career, I can tell you that I always got tech support questions about something that's clearly explained in the documentation. Doesn't matter how those docs are distributed either. People will STILL not get it even if you came to their house and set it up for them.
A printed manual costs money to produce and then you're stuck with it if you make a change to the product. Video is better than text and photos because you can show people how to do things but they still have to be able to grok it. There will always be people who are really painfully stupid and shouldn't be using your products. That can't be fixed because that would involve those people realizing that they are stupid which is an infinite loop.
when you would get the model number off something check and see if the manufacturer was still in business and then call or write a letter requesting a manual.
;) lol
;)
It does not bother me at all, the first thing I do is download a pdf now. Actually better because I get instantaneous gratification most of the time.
The other thing I have noticed is I buy very few books now, don't go to the library much anymore. But more interesting is I don't print save an archive information, I usually recall the search terms to display what I need at the time. Often don't try and save the information itself, just try and commit the search used to memory.
But that brings up one thing, what happens if the internet goes down, it's back to the stone ages I guess
Just my 2 cents
No one has the attention span to RTFM anymore.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this. Printed manuals are out of date before they are off the printer. It's much easier to update a PDF online and just provide links to the always up to date PDF.
The websites and PDF are more easily changed when one of the users realize that our product has major problems when held upside down in a closet during a full moon.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why do hate those of us who made S-100 bus computers in the 70s so?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Include a PDF pre-installed on the device - if your device's screen isn't good enough to view PDFs, then you've bought the wrong device -)
The PDF should include a URL for downloading the latest version of the PDF. I get annoyed when manufacturers release a new firmware or software update that changes or add features and don't revise the manual to match.
Hi, I think it is probably because so few people ever read the manual, coupled with economics... maybe a little HCI dreaming as well. Back in the 80's and 90's, even then when applications were mostly user unfriendly, many people didn't read the manual, it seemed that only a rare few ever did, then in the 90's people started worrying about user interfaces, so business types figured they could save some money by not printing the manuals, and claim they were 'green' in some sense too. Just what I recall from those days when there were manuals.
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
I have many fond memories of installing WordPerfect 5.1 on my office computer and taking the manual home to study on my own time. The manual explained almost everything you could do at that time in WordPerfect, in plain English, step by step, and with short examples. Thanks to the manual I learned how to do many things that I never actually had to myself and was often called upon by others in the office to help them. Several of us were of the same mind and studied the manual. Oh, the amazing things that got done there because several of us knew how to do extra things. I believe that manual helped to make WordPerfect the word processor of choice at that time. What a cynical, stoopid, useless time we live in now.
2) Updating: an online manual (usually in .pdf format) is enormously easier and faster than having to send out updated copies of the printed manual.
3) Less waste: updated manuals or EOL products both mean obsolete printed material taking up warehouse space.
4) For many consumer products, use is obvious enough that manuals really aren't needed as much as they used to be. And where manual type information and instruction is still needed, they have been largely supplanted by user forums.
5) Even when manuals were common and very useful, a LOT of people didn't bother to read them anyway. (hence RTFM-Read The Fucking Manual)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Exactly that. Those manuals in the box from the '80s and '90s? Never read.
a) You can download the manual from a website to read on a Kindle or iPad - most even come with a barcode on the outside to do just that.
b) Most people are tech-advanced enough NOT to need a manual
c) Most of the time, the manual is outdate by the time you receive the package
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I'm less bothered by the lack of a default paper manual, but I am bothered by things that don't really appear to have any kind of documentation at all, paper or electronic. Or if they have documentation, it's like paper thin (that's a pun) and doesn't cover most of the product or only a subset of features.
You're expected to just grok the design and figure it out, or google it somehow and find someone else who did figure it out and felt like sharing.
I feel like the world gets more and more technical but the actual documentation for it gets less and less. More complexity and less information.
How long must the manufacturer retain manuals online? All too often you can't see the manual for Rev A, they only have Rev D online. I'm not against electronic manuals but there are real conditions where a printed manual is of benefit. Maybe manuals could be treated like accessories, and you could buy the manual and have it shipped to you separately. I am aware that some manuals are available as replacement parts but it often isn't straightforward / cheap / simple to get these quickly and easily.
There was a project I read about some time ago, where a person could choose a book from a list and have it printed on demand -- this tech could work, maybe put a kiosk in an office supply store or print shop with this functionality. A Makers moment of some import, yes?
I'm not sure how many nerds actually RTFM, versus just having the ability to figure it out and/or search online for specific questions.
When I was a kid, and my father got a new piece of software, he definitely would RTFM. Cover-to-cover. Then he'd buy some 3rd party book on the same piece of software, and read that cover-to-cover. He'd then somehow be less able to use said software than I was, armed only with the intuition of someone with computer fluency.
I remember marking pages in my Visual Studio, Novel Netware, CorelDRAW and Wordperfect manuals. Netware in particular was a huge set of books. I also remember going through these manuals cover-to-cover to learn about these programs. Good times.
A pdf, wiki page or other HTML help is just not the same. I want something I can stick a post-it note in.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
I remember the day I cracked open the box for Ultima VI (in particular) - and in all it's glory were a cloth map of Britannia, two (count 'em) manuals (spellbook and general adventuring guide), and an "authentic replic Orb of the Moons moonstone"
Today this seems to have been replaced with one of two (mutually-exclusive?) options:
1) An in-game reference that's hopefully convenient to use, but might not be.
2) A completely unofficial 3rd party wiki site, that's very inconvenient to use (unless you have a secondary laptop/device next to your gaming machine).
Our products are not for consumers. Our products are super expensive, pretty much 10 times COT's. The required manufacturing Flow Control Documents, Quality Control Documents, Identification Documents, recording of all of the above on paper, and proper filings makes up 90% of the cost of the parts.
Documentation of API requires changes from both our company and customer, so you even need a little wag of that cost to add into the part. Or in some cases, where our customer likes to change all of the above, its about 5K every time they want to change anything before the next build.
Otherwise for COTS having available online PDF of your language flavor I think is preferred.
Do you know what's worse than not having a manual? Having a manual that tells you something outdated that no longer applies.
Tech companies now make a profit for novelty. "Windows (10) as a service" is the perfect example - try looking up online ways to do something particularly complex on W10, and chances are you will land on a non-official blog post from, say, 2016, which has instructions to access a setting that no longer exists, or simply changed names. Bummer. Now here's the tricky part - companies change so fast, they even neglect their own documentation being up to date. And yes, Microsoft does this too.
Microsoft is a good example because it's a company that once was known for great documentation and professional-level software QA. Now it stillbrags about that, yet more and more it hypocritically tries to follow Google's software. LOL Google - a company known for having no support at all on their software, and about as loop-hole'y as an ISP's or Utility's company support page. And no, Google Product Forums isn't support, and Google hardware support lines don't count - it's not their core business, google hardware is a branding stunt for their core market.
Meanwhile, what these and every company right now is making sure of is they provide documentation FOR DEVELOPERS - because that's the only empathy these tech companies still find - engineers ask tough questions, so they need accessible answers. Clients? Hell no. Instead of providing documentation for the end-user, they'd rather "formulate UX" that is understandable enough that usage itself becomes the documentation.
That is so cool, right? It is a load of bullcrap.
Let me tell you about the perfect UX for silicon valley these days: it doesn't last long. UX right now is a tragedy because, even though my 1990's Yamaha keyboard brought a bigg-ass manual that I didn't even have to read because I learned from pressing them buttons and listening to sound, the best thing about that experience is that it didn't fucking change. It was rock-solid usability - I pressed power and it always worked like expected. No hangs, no update nags, no new search bars, no unexpected arbitrary text pasword prompt, no deleted instrument because a royalty was no longer in place, no confusion because my PEANO instrument got a typo fixed, so now I longer know if it's the right piano when switching to it mid-performance.
You don't get manuals in today's stuff because they are a liability. You're a tech company. You push a change, and forget to update the manual, and you're gonna get users calling CS. Do this on paid, licensed, professional, critical stuff, you're gonna get sued. Another example: do you like Tesla cars and are saving up to buy that Model 3 ASAP? Imagine Elon 420 decides to push an OTA that makes you go armageddon on your 1st child's birthday. Unlikely you say? So was the weather channel getting a windows update live.
Manuals aren't necessary because the webapp and the stores and the always-connected commandment made it all transient. If I could put a logo on Silicon Valley as a whole, it would be Hermes (the greek god) wearing a pair of Nikes with wings, and with his back turned to the viewer. Because they expect you to keep up, but don't give a fuck.
First of all, once we became networked, it was possible for 90% of everything to be propagated by word of mouth. This wasn't the case back in the 1980s. (I was there.)
Second, if you never make a formal claim, you can't ever be wrong.
Right around the time that most developers realized that their application could only ever be as stable as the APIs you develop on top of (the dark days began with Windows 95 and progeny) it became wise to keep a low profile on your software ever working precisely as advertised. What's your other choice? Become a lifetime expert on the care and feeding of Windows 95, 98, and next of sin? A true coding artist could write a stable program on top of Windows 95, but how long does that last in the marketplace?
Right. Three years. Absolute maximum.
Then, you kind of want to write in your manual: well, this function would work properly, except for that bug-ass piece of shit library underneath. But finger pointing is a dangerous game, because maybe what you're suffering from is conceptual impedance mismatch, and you might both be at fault (it takes two to tango).
[*] But of course, a true coding artist could design an API that wouldn't elicit conceptual impedance mismatch in the first place ...
Another thing about the 1980s: half of all software design was cramming a large thing into a tiny place. Seriously. If it wasn't a RAM problem, it was a pixel problem, or a disk sector problem. So a lot of your manual explained a host of unnatural design decisions. These are no longer primary. These days, bad design is mainly self-inflicted.
Finally, the primary factor in application choice in the 2010s is UI style. People tend to choose a UI style they're comfortable with (there's generally a lot of choice, too, in the variables least important to long-term function and stability). Consequently, most manuals would be preaching to a self-selected choir.
I still read the manual a lot (online). PostgreSQL isn't going away any time soon, even if there's now twenty other cloud-compatible databases. I'll read the manual for something with staying power at the drop of a pin.
On the other hand, life is too short to read any manual with the title "xxxScript for Dummies". Don't even try. It's like machine learning, where the fastest way to fall behind is to keep up (you can either read the results of others, or pursue your own; pick any one).
Since updates are delivered automatically and electronically, any printed manual that would ship with a product is pretty much out of date as soon as it is turned on.
The android example is a good one. First it is not a pure android, so a manual from Google might not even apply (the manufacturer and cell provider can tweak it). Second, it is not a pure product, so a manual from name your hardware vendor here may not even apply (because the cell provider can change it). Your cell provider often has the last say on what is on the device initially, which apps are there, configuration etc., but as configuration they won't have a manual for all of the stuff they don't touch.
And as soon as it is turned on and updated, any manual it might have had may not even resemble what you are looking at in the slightest.
Besides, isn't this more about a relationship anyway? I mean, you'll bond more with a device that is more like a puzzle that you have to figure out than one that comes with a manual. Along the way, you'll want to know more about it, will do research and eventually you'll find and try all of those features you want to find in a manual, but this time you'll have a relationship with it which is more important to the vendors than an actual manual.
Everyone loves to hate on Apple, but their products have no manuals and yet they have a huge list of fans. The missing manual isn't what garners such love from the fans, it is the building of the relationship with apple and the devices that leads to this kind of fanaticism.
Search: (Device You Own) manual. Bingo! Downloadable PDF that you can print and have a hard copy! I usually just store the PDF manuals on my computer.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
In a Tesla you can turn its A/C on, while it is in the garage and peacefully read the manual without any fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. Actually the sound system and acoustics are very good, there is no engine noise, so it is not a bad place to listen to music or to banish your kids to so that their "music" does not disturb you....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's called a bookshelf. Of course most people buy them from somewhere like Ikea and they can't figure out how to put them together.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Old man yells at cloud. Don't waste my time with a shitty little book, link me to the pdf with a searchable TOC
when I got stuck on a programing task in the 80s I often stayed stuck. I didn't have any good teachers and only a limited # of books. And forget about a C compiler or assembler. I didn't even know they existed let alone where to get one.
With the Internet when I hit a wall I can go on stack overflow, ask a question and 9 times out of 10 some kind soul will point out my mistake. Heck, I rarely have to do that. Odds are somebody beat me to it. Better yet, there's often 10 explanations for the same thing. That sounds redundant, but if the first 5 don't make sense #6 often does.
The Internet's a whole new world of capabilities. There's a generation who's going to grow up with all the answers at their fingertips. And rather than make them lazy I think we'll see them spend less time learning and more doing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Printed material is just tattoos on dead trees. Creepy..
Organization? You must be joking..
Nobody reads them anyway, and even if they did most people don't understand Chinglish.
I can totally understand why we don't get nice printed manuals that ship in the box. They are expensive to print and quickly become outdated. It is often easier to read and online version. The real question is why there is rarely an up-to-date online manual to go with the product you buy. I have often bought something that has a few links on a postcard sized manual, but the online manual is the wrong model, has decades old information in it, or is so general that you can't find the answer to nearly any question. Nearly no one provides a current, useful manual online anymore either!!!
The problem isn't just missing printed manuals, we also have a problem of there being no PDF manual as well, and often no online manual. For Android and iPhone both, learning how to use those involved a lot of time online searching through various hint and help sites and watching stupid videos intended to earn advertising because no one gets paid if they just write plain text.
Which raises the costs, and thus partly determines whether or not they bother to sell it in your country. I've lost track of how many people (mainly Brits, though that's probably just an English-language bias) I've seen on the net complain about how expensive their electronics are (vs. in the US), and in the next paragraph talk about how (e.g.) the consumer-protection laws they have mean that you can always do a warranty return to the store that sold you the device, rather than to the manufacturer. That kind of service isn't free, you know... our consumer protections are pretty minimal, but they are reflected in the lower prices we pay.
I've had a number of small cameras with 30x lenses. Much better than a cell phone. Both Sony and Canon cameras used to come with a manual the size of the camera and thin. It fit in the camera casse. First, there was no 10 pages of "Do not drop the camera in toilet" junk. Second, they just showed a pic of the camera and then gave you the tree of features for each setting. Short and sweet. Usually about 40 pages. If ANY manufacturer had a small camera with a manual like that it would be my next buy. They don't exist (and I've really looked).
Why the manual and not the internet? I can circle things in the index. I can underline and mark the features I keep forgetting. I don't have to stand in a square in Montenegro, turn on my cell phone and search the internet to find the so-called manual (meaning a brochure of all the add-ons they are trying to sell you plus a long list of half-blank pages with WARNING! in size 4 type inserted by the legal team). I need the equivalent of a Linux cheat sheet.
A note for the Japanese companies making these wonderful but barely usable $300 cameras. There is a real business opportunity here....
Why should a game developer pay for making a manual that many will ignore, when they can license the manual creation to Prima, who can charge them an inflated price for it? And include the walkthrough and database dump at the same time.
What - you don't want/need the collectors edition manual for your stove?
People keep saying the printed manuals are gone because "few people wanted to read them", or "that's what people want".
But IMO, we started running into a real problem where the people making a lot of the devices and software didn't have good enough writing skills to produce good manuals for them.
I remember really starting to see this in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the small computer reseller I worked for would receive products like new modems or I/O cards with instruction books that were really difficult to read, since they were very poor translations from Chinese. The fact we were building PCs from a bunch of components like this meant we really didn't HAVE a good set of instructions to bundle with the computers when we sold them. So we'd give customers a folder stuffed with all the little instruction sheets and the motherboard manual (which was usually the best manual of the bunch, though also questionable at times). Only the big name computer brands like Lenovo, Toshiba or HP could afford to hire people to write up decent instruction books to include. And most of those really weren't that helpful either. They wasted a lot of time with diagrams showing you where the lights, connection ports and switches or buttons were, plus any mandatory legal statements about things like FCC certifications and some really high-level overview of how to navigate a few things in Windows and any proprietary crapware they bundled on top of it. A far cry from the manuals the 1980's 8-bit era computers included, that taught you how to PROGRAM the thing.
Every corporate I.T. job I've had has included some technical writing as part of the user support I've had to do, and I see a lot of instructional stuff put together by various colleges and universities along the same lines, for students and staff. So really, manufacturers have been able to successfully "offload" expectations in that manner too. (Why write and bundle instructions to teach you the ins and outs of setting up email on your Android phone? Your school or employer has already spent money asking someone to make you one.)
Even as an advanced computer user now, with over 30 years of experience with the things? I still learn a lot of hidden tricks and tips for using whatever the latest operating system is on my machine when I watch the YouTube videos or read the enthusiast web sites that post about them. This stuff really SHOULD have been documented by the creators of the code. But these days, I think they just assume the knowledge gets disseminated by the Internet-using crowd, and some of the users enjoy the "Easter egg" element of surprise of discovering the stuff, even long after using the product.
Paper manual are environment-friendly, since they are a carbon sink. All the books in your library are made of carbon that is not in the atmosphere.
The machines we sell, use to come with printed manuals. After 5-6 years on lease, they would come back to us. 70% of the time, the plastic wrap was still on the manual. With the PDF version of the manuals, which come on a DVD, or downloaded online, they are searchable. Our repair manuals use to be printed, until the late 90's, then they switched to PDF, which I prefer over the printed one. I can edit, highlight, and most important, key word search them.
As a member of the Society for Technical Communication ( https://www.stc.org/ ), I created very technical documentation. My company made software for people who create circuit boards (up to 16 layers thick). Software written by engineers for engineers.
Our users had to convert circuit diagrams into printed circuits that actually worked. Even with our software and our manuals there was an element of magic (this was 20 years ago). For instance 'noise' from one circuit interfering with another. We were in a perpetual update mode and the documentation was always a bit behind, but without it the software would have been useless.
OTOH, I'm a Mac user and since 1984 I've never needed a manual cuz 'it just works'. Even third party software is usually designed with Mac principles and it just works. Exceptions are Adobe, math and CAD programs which still require study to use effectively. Even MS Office can get beginners to a good start without a manual. And Windows itself is almost understandable having copied Mac OS rather closely.
Smartphones can be confusing in this early part of their evolution, but very soon standards will arrive and users will be able to move from one to another without having to relearn from scratch. Some old timers may recall the Model T and other early autos which came with many different configurations, levers, switches, gauges, doodads, etc; all now standardized. You don't need a manual to drive a Chevy or a Suzuki car.
...omphaloskepsis often...
When a manual is printed and shipped, you can never change it. If it's a file sitting on a web server, I can rev it ten times per day for virtually no cost. And you save a few bucks plus not kill a few trees.
Thanks to near ubiquitous internet access, both hardware and software have rapidly increased update cycles compared to "back in the day", many of which can affect the user interface.
In many cases, the manual will literally be outdated before it's finished printing.
On top of that the average user is much more at ease with various hardware and software, meaning many/most people don't bother with a manual anyway. Why waste the money? The cost for including a PDF, online knowledge base or how-to is next to nothing, especially compared to printing manuals.
Plus, online manuals have one major advantage over a paper copy: it takes literally seconds to find all mentions of a specific keyword across a 1,000 page PDF file -- good luck locating even a fraction of that info in a paper manual.
Dead-tree manuals are expensive to print, heavy to ship, often contain errors, and cannot be quickly updated when you change the device. Also, not searchable. AND most people don't read them. I used to WRITE them and I never read them.
A CD with a PDF of the manual is light and cheap, and is searchable. A line in the "Help" documentation that links to an online manual is lighter and cheaper, and the online manual is not only searchable but also updateable for errors or changes in the device.
Having played around with an Atari and Commodore 64, I first got my hands on an IBM PC compatible in 1993 when I started at secondary school. Back then I was able to read the entire manuals for the 3 pieces of software installed on them over the course of a week or so: MSDOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Works. Now I work in IT support. If I had a printed manual for Microsoft Windows 10, I would need to obtain a new one every time an update was released as the layout of Settings and other screens changes as features are removed and added. When repairing or servicing a clients computer, I often get asked how I keep up with all the changes. I explain to my clients that for me the industry is no longer about knowing the software inside and out (as I was able to achieve back in 1993). Instead, it has evolved into a research role - I have had to hone my research skills to locate the details for the specific piece of software I have been lumbered with fixing on that particular hour of the day. In the few hours I have been at a clients property, countless new pieces of software have been released online which I may be expected to now support.
I get that paper manuals are heavy and expensive to ship, while a download is cheap. I don't mind the e-manual.
However, the manuals for purchases seem to have become increasingly shallow. It's just a place to stick the ubiquitous CYA warnings and legalese ("Keep sharp tools out of children!" "Don't operate electrical appliance in the bathtub!"). Usage instructions are likewise so vague that it is more helpful to figure out the working of the device by trial and error.
Document writing is an art. It is hard to be concise, clear and at the same time comprehensive. Same goes for software development documentation, by the way - good thing Agile these days puts "face-to-face communication above documentation" (good? not).
I guess its the way things go...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Equating the environmental concerns of the manual, which few people read, is not necessary at all for the function of the device, and can be obtained in alternative formats, with the actual device itself is just utterly stupid.
Instead look at the environmental cost benefit analysis of the printed manual vs the device itself. You'll find there's no good reason to send paper at all with any product.
Also technical writing. No manual, paper or PDF these days even remotely comes close to the resources at hand on the internet or a dedicated book on the topic. Why settle for second best? Before the days of the internet paper manuals made sense. These days most people don't even read the manual online but rather look for other ways to solve their problems.
For something that will barely change over a decade (like your VCR that you bought in the 80s), yes manuals would make sense, and some nerds (like us /.) were actually RTFM.
For a modern pieces of equipment, like s smartphone :
well, over the time the manual is written, translated, printed, and packaged into the box (should take the last couple of months of a product development cycle before shipping), the OS would have been going through several revisions, most of them changing its aspect (including changing drastically the menu structure).
And anyway, when you take the device out of the box, you would need to install ASAP some extra security patches, which might yet again change how the software looks like.
In other word, the device will look completely differently between back when the manual was first written and how it looks now.
In fact if you pay close attention, this *already* did start in the late 80s and during the 90s for products that did change a lot.
e.g.: motherboard BIOS.
Ever noticed that back then, each mobo manual fell compelled to also give a detailled explanation of all the BIOS Setup menus ? And how these never actually matched the one you see when you turned on the mobo ? and further upgrade flashes (to support more CPU and RAM variants, etc. fix last minute bugs in some controller, etc.) introduce yet more different options ?
10 years down the line, the mobo's manual is still relevant regarding hardware elements, like position of jumpers and connectors on the mobo.
at the moment of unboxing, the mobo's manual is already out of date regarding the BIOS.
Modern manufacturer have simply come to this realisation regarding devices that are mostly software driven.
That, and yes, most people don't indeed RTFM to begin with, so nowadays even a blender won't package a manual in.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who on this great blue marble in the wide universe could possibly withstand 50 pages of Chinglish, Google translations of Chinese to English?
{O.O}
If you create a product that has to be sold in many countries, you have to provide a manual in all those languages.
Your options:
1. You provide the manual for each language in every box. This gets expensive (lots of manuals to print, large/heavy box = higher shipping cost). Customers don't like getting a 900-page manual, of which only 50 pages are relevant to them.
2. You divide and conquer. Each language or group of languages gets its own box and manual. Now you have dozens of box designs and manuals to keep track of, each with their own part number etc.
3. Avoid the problem: stick a quick-reference guide with some pictures and a URL of the manual in the box. You get a small, light box and only one part number. And you get the ability to update the manual.
We've thrown the baby out with the bathwater with respect to books. Sure we can ship badly formatted PDFs to customers and forget that as far as being able to visualize very complex information, a big book can be marked up, have coloured chapter markers down the side, and lets you 'map the content in your mind' as you flip pages.
For consumer products the Mac-ification of product design has been great. (Does anyone remember how crappy phone interfaces were before the iPhone was launched?) For enterprise-grade, technical products that may often require courses to operate, complex documentation sets are the rule and yes, paper books and posters are very helpful.
They are also bespoke. Getting nicely printed documentation actually makes you look like you are being serviced by a grown up company that is not afraid of organizing information and making things coherent rather than throwing 'good enough' where-do-I-click articles on-line and hoping that's good enough. Alternatively it can mean you're part of a regulated industry where things have to get written down or else...
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I see a lot of partial answers in this thread, but I wanted to list some of the steps in preparing printed documentation of the quality we had in the 80s just to give an idea of the scope of the project. This is long, but not even comprehensive.
These things would all ideally be done for online documentation, whether HTML- or PDF-based. They're all expensive, which is a big reason we don't have 80s quality of documentation, even on the web. But there are other problems with printing:
Finally, there are cynical reasons for not providing high-quality documentation. An obvious one is support contracts. Whether by phone/email or on-site visit, the company can charge a lot of money to help you use their poorly documented product.
Or, just leave the users to their own devices. If your product is popular, the users will all jump on somewhere like Reddit and build their own documentation, some of them obsessively. Voila, free docs at zero cost.
the 'fake' nobel prizes were handed out a few weeks ago, i think there was an mention of it on ./
one of the winners was that most people don't read manuals.
and that is the reason why you don't get one anymore.
i'm OK with downloadable pdf's anyway.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.