Re: saving trees (printing)

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Hi Bill -

Sorry, this is a high-speed brain dump, as I have about 5 minutes till 
dinner is ready (Oven Baked Risotto Carbonara--yes, I know--risotto 
carbonara. It sounds weird.)

IBM stopped providing paper manuals with all z/OS (mainframe OS) a few 
years ago. A handful of manuals are still provided as hardcopy, while 
the other 100+ are shipped in PDF and BookManager (IBM's own online) 
format.

According to surveys taken after the paper manuals were withdrawn, a 
small percentage of customers really want hardcopies, while an unknown 
percentage would prefer them back but aren't that bothered. A small but 
vocal minority are concerned that IBM will withdraw the BookManager 
versions and they'll be stuck with PDF only. I say 'stuck' because, 
although BookManager has its limitations (clunky viewer and butt-ugly 
formatting) users love its search capabilities. Acrobat's search 
facilities have just about caught up but not to the extent that a 
comfortable BookManager user would feel compelled to switch.

Meanwhile, IBM is working on browser-based tools that sit on top the 
existing library and provide easier search and navigation. The main one 
is a Windows Explorer-like tree view of the entire z/OS library. Any 
user with web access can drill down to select an OS component, 
publication, chapter, topic, and so on.

To sum up, IBM has managed (mostly) to do away with paper manuals, 
without a user revolt, even though customers pay a hefty premium  for 
the software. I think they've managed this quite cleverly:

   * a few manuals are still supplied as hardcopy where it makes sense
     to do so (I forget which ones, but there is some logic to it)
   * all manuals are supplied on CD as PDF so they can be viewed and,
     if the customer wants, printed
   * all manuals are supplied in the familiar BookManager format
   * IBM is working hard to improve cross-book searching and navigation
     to make it easier to find a particular chunk of info online than
     it ever was on paper (find the guy who borrowed the manual, scan
     TOC and index, riffle through pages...)

If you have a small library with reasonably self-contained manuals you 
can probably get away with just providing PDFs. As the library gets 
larger and more interconnected I think you have to provide multiple 
formats (HTML; Help; perhaps XML with smart search capabiltites). If 
you're worried about user resistance and bad PR I'd have a transition 
period where you make hardcopies available on request for a fee. With 
on-demand printing you don't have to carry inventory. Some customers 
might be unhappy with just a PDF, but I bet if you give them PDFs and 
the option to buy bound hardcopies for $50-$100 a pop most will decide 
the free PDF is not so bad after all.

Second case study: AuthorIt

I think you've used AIT. If so, you'll know you get softcopies of the 
manuals and you can choose to pay for hardcopies. I found the manuals 
not very useful so I didn't order the bound copies. Eventually I worked 
out that the knowledge base on the AIT web site had the content of all 
the supplied manuals plus more, and was kept up to date (as opposed to 
the PDF manuals, which were a snapshot of what was available whenever 
the manuals were last cut). If I need to do another AIT job I'll 
probably not bother with the PDFs and just bookmark the KB.


I think the lesson is that you can't stop customers being unhappy when 
you withdraw printed manuals, but you can help them get over it by 
making the online versions clearly superior in at least one respect (for 
example, by gutting the printed manuals ;^)

Cheers

Stuart

ps. the Oven Baked Risotto Carbonara turned out pretty well
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