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From: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.misc,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Aggravating manuals
Message-ID: <1915@sputnik.COM>
Date: Tue, 6-Oct-87 12:01:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: sputnik.1915
Posted: Tue Oct  6 12:01:55 1987
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Keywords:


A dissenting opinion:

I LIKE perfect-bound manuals.  I like the 3-hole punched kind too, but I
don't really care.  The bound ones fit flat into my bookshelf (where most of
my manuals sit, collecting dust after a few weeks.)  They look a little more
professional too.  They don't tear out their holes or get folded so bad.  If
you use a cheap round ring binder this is a big problem.  I hate spiral
binding and that plastic multi-pronged binding too.  The pages get totally
torn up after awhile and the thing doesn't close neatly.

Sure perfect bound manuals are less expensive (because they are easy to
manufacture and also because they don't include a $5 slip cover and
slope-ring binder.  Sure perfect bound manuals are copy protection.  People
have been recommending this for about the last five years now as the best
form of copy protection.  I guess we can soon look for those "How to use
1-2-3 books (that strangely seem to be a good substitute for the manual if
you pirated the disk) to start coming in a ring binder soon.

Look guys, what do you want?  The whole package for free?  It costs about $5
per disk to copy and store floppies.  It costs about $5 for the binder and
slipcover.  It probably costs another $5 for the manual.  A regular-sized
company can't even keep it's doors open unless it can sell the product for
about 3 times the cost of manufacture, and that doesn't count any return on
the design investment.  That's just to sustain the manufacturing,
distribution and bookkeeping.  Then there's the profit for the distributor
and retailer.  You get a lower limit of about $50 for a mail order product
and about $80 for one distributed through retail.  Games can be a bit
cheaper since they don't need a manual and thus have a lower manufacturing
cost.  The very high volume products can also get by with a little less, as
can old products that have paid back their engineering costs.

Perfect-bound manuals permit lower cost software to be sold to you the end
user.  That $5 savings in manual cost permits a $15-20 decrease in price to
you.  (Sure, it could also mean $15 more profit to the maker, but in the
market place, a situation like that gets corrected soon by a new competitor.)
And if you don't like copy protection, make users ethical.  Bound manuals
are a major improvement over not being able to copy the program.