As I move to get more paper out of my life, one thing I’m throwing away with more confidence is manuals. It’s pretty frequent that I can do a search for product model numbers or other things on a manual, and find a place to download the PDF. Then I can toss the manual. I need to download the PDF, because the company might die and their web site might go away.
I would like to make this even easier. For starters, it would be nice if the UPC database (UPC are the bar codes found on all retail products) would also offer a link to getting all manuals and paper that come with a product. I would then be able to just photograph the bar codes of all my products with my phone or camera, and cause automatic download or escrow of all manuals. Perhaps a symbol next to the UPC could tell me this is guaranteed to work.
It would be even better if companies escrowed the manuals, which is to say paid a one-time fee to a trustable company which would promise to keep the documents online forever. This company must be backed by a very solid company itself, perhaps a consortium of all the major vendors with a pact that if any of them go other, the rest take up the slack of maintaining the site.
In fact, all free, public documents should have a code on them that can be turned into a URL where I can fetch the document, as PDF, HTML or even MSWord. Any attempt to scan such a document would pick up this code and know it doesn’t have to scan the rest unless it is marked up. For books, we sould key off the ISBN as well as the UPC. Eventually one of the newer, compact 2-D “barcodes” could be used to code a number to find the docs.
Of course, many products are now coming without manuals at all, and that’s largely fine with me.