Online Car Manuals

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Graham 20 years ago

I'm doing some research for a University Buisness Project on selling online Car Maintanance Manuals in chapters, and hoped anyone with a car could help by answering five quick questions?

- Your Age:

- Do you own a car maintanance manual (I.e. Haynes)? - Why / Why Not?

- Would you consider buying a chapters of Haynes manuals online, at a much lower price, for printing when you need to perform a certain task?

Example chapters would include: · Weekly Checks (Oil, Batteries, Break Fluid, Steering Fluid, Screen Wash, Coolant, Wiper blades, Tyres, Fuses) · Engine Repairs · Transmission · Brakes and Suspension · Bodywork and Electrical Systems

- What price would you consider reasonable for such a booklet? Less Than £1 £1 - £2 £2 - £3 £3 - £4 £4 - £5 £5+

Thank you for any responses given,

- Dan Margetts.

I was thinking - it would be nice to have an electronic version of the manual available on cd - maybe in a sleeve inside the front cover. I'd prob pay £3 extra if it was included. (I expect there'd be lot's on ebay then though ) Graham

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Chris Bolus 20 years ago

Furry nuff, although of all the HP LJs that's the one I'd least like - I have a 1200N in my room at work which has a nifty double-sided print function. More than happy with my HL-1430 though.

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Chris Bolus 20 years ago

Ah yes, the bit that goes "first remove the gearbox as decribed in chapter 17, then remove the bonnet as descibed in chaper 45"? Pees me off too.

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Chris Bolus 20 years ago

You mean there aren't already?

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Peter Hill 20 years ago

All it needs a change of media format to something incompatible and a few years later all those CD's are unreadable. All it needs is the

8cm DVD to be made standard and the 12cm DVD and CD's will be un-useable. If multi GB CF or other memory cards get as cheap as a CD there could be a move to them instead. You can easily get a whole CD on to a 1GB CF card in CDaudio format and close to 9 boxed CF cards into the space of one CD case. 4Gb is close to DVD size and would hold a film without all the directors bits. Price 1/2's every 18 months or less, so about 10 years time.

When was the last time you used a 5 1/4", 3.5" or 3" floppy? I've got boxes and boxes of them around here (even some 8"). The only time I've used one in the last 2 years was when I booted my Einstein up to rip the contents of my car's ECU rom (it somehow just happed to drop into the MOS expansion socket).

Look at the BBC Doomsday project, only did it 20 years ago. A few years ago they had the Phillips 12" laser discs but didn't have a working player left, they couldn't access the content. They looked and begged and offered to pay money so they could extract the original content and re-master it to WWW or CD. Looks like it was saved but it was really close to being down the pan.

formatting link

BBC recorded over a lot of early videotape as it was so expensive they had to re use it. If it had been put on film there would have been no possibility of re-use and many "classic" shows would still exist.

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Guy King 20 years ago

The message from Chris Bolus contains these words:

That's one reason publishers like DRM, innit. I got my Audi 100 manual off eBay 'cos it was cheaper. It was clean and looked unused. If it'd been a download I'd almost certainly not have been allowed to sell it on or give it away with the car when I sell it.

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Peter Hill 20 years ago

Hanyes did put some (if not all) manuals on line a few years back. It soon got withdrawn due to some technical problem (hacked?).

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Chris Bolus 20 years ago

Yes, except that we're getting used to format changes and drive space is now so cheap it's easy enough to rip the contents of a disc to HDD before installing the new media. You're right that CD will eventually become obsolete but I think it will be with us for a good few years yet; don't forget DVD drives will also read CDs and the capacity of a DVD is far from being eclipsed. CF is too intricate & relatively fragile to get that cheap, but SD or something along those lines might cut it eventually.

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