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Date:      Wed, 29 Jan 1997 01:36:43 -0800 (PST)
From:      Josef Grosch <jgrosch@superior.truenorth.org>
To:        nadav@cs.technion.ac.il (Nadav Eiron)
Cc:        giles@nemeton.com.au, schluntz@pinpt.com, chat@freebsd.org, doc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Suggestion for the FreeBSD Book.
Message-ID:  <199701290936.BAA22567@superior.truenorth.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95-heb-2.07.970129104742.24858A-100000@csd> from Nadav Eiron at "Jan 29, 97 10:54:44 am"

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>
>
>On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Giles Lean wrote:
>
>> 
>> On Tue, 28 Jan 97 10:06:14 Pacific Standard Time  "Sean J. Schluntz" wrote:
>> 
>> > What if the FreeBSD Book was published like some cookbooks.  A shrink wrapped 
>> > set of three ring hole punched papers with index pages and a small binder 
>> > (Fiction Hardback sized.)  Then people could subscribe to the updates, and 
>> > FreeBSD could just mail out the sections that have changed.  
>> 
>> Every vendor I've seen shipping documentation this way has stopped.
>> 
>> Too ugly, too time consuming, too expensive for the users who have to
>> do the updates.
>
>DEC for one, used to have the VMS docs in binders up until V6.0 (that's a
>huge set of docs - some 30 or more books) and then they moved to paper
>back. The official excuse was that the binders are not recycleable (so now
>DEC is out to save the rain forest or something?) while the paperbacks are
>printed on recycled paper. IMHO, the binders were simply too expensive to
>manufacture and ship (they weight about twice as much as the paper back
>version). To the user I guess the binders are a blessing. The paperbacks
>can't be left open on a specific page without them falling apart after a
>week of heavy use. Since they have some 30 books, and each version updates
>just a small subset of them (usually up to 8) they still don't have to
>reproduce the whole set for each update.
>
>Bottom line is, IMHO, that binedr updates are not practical for the
>*vendor* not the user, especially if you have a small number of volumes.
>In most cases you'll replace a complete volume anyhow. As a user, I like
>it *alot*, especially for something the size of the VMS docs. For a single
>volume - I guess it doesn't really matter.
>

Another down side to the 3-ring binder for the vendor is the ease of
copying the docs. In a past life I did a lot of work on VAX/VMS, `round the
time 4.7. At a number of sites I saw the client buy one copy of the
documentation set and allow the programmers to xerox as many copies as they
wanted. Often there were 30 or 40 copys floating around the site. 

Sun also used to issue their docs in 3-ring format. AFAIK only IBM is still
doing their mainframe docs in this format. Of course, if you have ever seen
IBM mainframe "wall of docs" then you would understand why they still
perfer to work in this foramt.


Josef

-- 
Josef Grosch       | Laugh while you can, monkey boy ! |    FreeBSD 2.1.6
jgrosch@sirius.com |          - John Warfin -          | UNIX for the masses



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