Owner's Manual Format

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.