Is it just me...

[Tony Duell]

> I'm sure Herb Johnson will pipe in and possibly agree with part of what I 
> say:
> 
> Many collectors want original manuals and will pay big $ for some, while 
> this doesn't apply to the guy selling a photo copy it still drives up prices 
> in general.
> 
> Many people want printouts that they can hold in their hands and don't have 
> a cheap way of getting decent printouts, inkjet printing is both expensive 
> and is not as durable as laser/photo copies.
> 
> Many people are unaware of the PDF's.
> 
> Many people still use dial-up accounts and would rather pay someone to snail 
> mail them docs.
> 
> Many PDF's are harder to read than photo-copies (I always try to proof mine 
> after scanning).
> 
> Many purchases are spur of the moment without even loopking for free copies.
> 

I certainly prefer paper copies. The only ways I have of reading pdfs are 
the local internet cafe or my parent's Mac. The latter has a printer, an 
old Apple LW2NT, but it takes about 5 minutes to transfer a full page 
bitmap to it over localtalk. Not exactly practical for a large printset!

YEs, I can view the pdfs on-screen. But firstly I can't do that at my 
workbench or when stuck behind a PDP11 rack, or in bed, or... And 
secondly it takes a lot longer to display a page on the mac (and on every 
PC I've ever used, I am not talking about my slow PC here) than it takes 
me to flip through a paper manual. Sure I can't read the manual that 
fast, but I can tell if a page contains text, or a source listing, or a 
binary dump, or a schematic, or what. If I am looking, say, for a 
schematic, I can quickly skip over pages that contain other sorts of 
information. This I can't do on-screen.

I am grateful for things like bitsavers. and I have asked a friend with a 
CD burner and broadband to burn the odd manual to a CD for me (don't 
worry, I haven't, and won't, ask him to grab everything, it's just 
the odd manual for machinss that I am actually interested in). But I 
certainly won't being giving up my collection of paper manuals, 
schematics, etc any time soon either.

-tony