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In article ,
"RST Engineering" wrote: SHUUURE Travis. Ever run a company? Every put a product out? If so, I'll take advice from you. Produce the CD. Produce the printed manual. Produce the website download. You want to calculate the cost of the stuff you recommend? More than the cost of producing the print manual to start with. The company I work for (as a technical writer) has transitioned from printed docs to docs on CD to online (with a single doc pointing to the documentation website in the product box) over the past few years. Why? Because print costs were killing us. On the other hand, a major product would require about four to six *feet* of shelf space for the full documentation set. (There were jokes about "buy now, and you get a free forklift to move your documentation!") If you're even producing thousands of pages per month of new documentation, ask us how we're doing it. :} You've got a pretty nice website, by the way; looks to me as if it wouldn't be all that much more trouble/expense to add links to your manuals (in pdf) for customers to download from your support page. There are ways to get around high documentation print costs, especially if your shipping volume is low. The same PDF files that you use to send to the printer could be used to print-on-order for customers who select hardcopy manual on their order. The printed manual wouldn't ship with the product, but be shipped directly from the printer to the customer. Might even beat the product. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that you only change $10 for printed manuals. Given overhead on top of actual print costs, you certainly aren't getting rich off offering them. :} You could do the same for a doc CD, if customers really wanted one, although bandwidth these days is getting to the point where CDs don't always make more sense, at least for print-ish documentation. (For a complete set of plans for a kit plane, they could be verr' nice, even if the builder doesn't have access to a large-format inkjet plotter/printer.) Multimedia, which we've done in the past, is marginally possible for download, but much more convenient on CD/DVD. And almost certainly more expensive to produce than you really want to get into. |
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