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Originally Posted by David G4EBT
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There is a long established UK supplier of manuals who has been in existence before internet. Over the years, I've had several manuals from the firm and they've always been high quality copies. With the passage of time, a wide selection of manuals have appeared on internet, and interestingly, some of those carry that company's stamp. I guess that if the firm have, say, copied and supplied an AVO manual, whoever has bought it might think "it's not the supplier's property - it's AVOs, so I've as much right as he has to copy it and circulate it for nothing". Well yes and no - he had to source the manual, copy and print it (they're now downloads from his site) and had he not done so, maybe it wouldn't have appeared so widely in the first instance.
(We've been here before, several times).
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David
I know the company you are referring to - or at least I know their products, sold on various CDs for many years. I have to disagree with you that these are "high quality copies". These are the cheapest possible scans, in fact automated scans, where everything is black and white, even when images demand at least greyscale, and sometimes colour. And often the resolution is so poor that critical detail is lost from things like schematics.
These copies are a prime example of what motivated me to start doing the job properly back in 2002 for the vmars archive. I worked out how to get high resolution scans, while keeping the file size moderate - back in those days before the advent of fast internet, the file size was pretty important. And the repeated stamping of the company name all over the copy makes the product anything but "high quality"!
To emphasise the commercial motivation behind this production, the huge range of equipments claimed to be on some CDs, is also a con - usually there is one manual, which is then claimed to cover a myriad of variants and similar models - all separately listed of course - to impress the customers. I have complained about this directly to the company concerned in the past, having spent money to get a manual claimed to be on a CD, only to find that it wasn't.
To my mind these copies are the last resort of the desperate. Of course, in some cases its the only copy of manual available anywhere - so they can claim to be providing some sort of service. But lets be clear that its pretty second rate by the standards set in the last 15 years - and much of the material is not only free now, it has been offered free since the day it came off the scanner.
Richard