More on manuals -- update

========== Thanks in advance. Its good to see someone that acts rather than just talks. You'd never make it in politics...

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

Thanks. It remains to be done, but it is about a week's worth of work. I am busy with a few things at once (4th axis, sick relative) so it may take longer.

Good for you, Iggy. Our taxes paid for those manuals, and it's good to hear that they can find an extended benefit in the public sector.

I know I have benefitted greatly from the Navy welding manual I found a while ago.

Jon

Investigate ways to monetize the site (get money for ads, etc) You deserve to make some money on it, even if it's a few pennies from Adsense. It's free. Well, a lot of it is, but it involves work, just like you're doing it. You may be giving the manuals away for free, but you deserve to make enough to cover costs.

Steve

That's a good point. I may do that. The numbers I ran suggest that it will never amount to a lot of money, but I am OK with it.

I'd suggest you also get hooked up with Paypal and put a donation link on the site. That should cost nothing. I'll bet a fair number of folks will donate, and that would help offset the server costs.

Jon

Instead of any damned advertisements, put up a donation button and let people donate to the site. It's MUCH less invasive and will be much better accepted by all.

-- You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.? -- Ronald Reagan

Depends, I guess. I opted to keep my website on a "more expensive cheap server" when I figured out that the "less expensive cheap server" was basically looking to provide a lot of "free" services that consisted of polluting my domain name with a lot of advertising I'd have no control over. For less than $25/year difference, I'd rather stick with a clean site.

Effectively, putting ads on Iggy's manual site moves it from "Iggy is annoyed by people selling CDs of public domain materials and puts up a free site" to "Iggy sees other people making money from public domain materials and decides to get in on the action", however small and indirect that action may be in the proposed case.

Not quite true, I think. Paypal VERY quickly gets to the point where they want money for letting you get money (beyond simple per-transaction charges, which are bad enough). If you already do enough *B*y sales that you are at that point, it won't cost anymore, presumably, unless it does due to transaction count - I haven't really looked into the fine details recently, just smelled a big rat (that kicked in at 5 transactions in a year, IIRC) which has cooled any inclination to sell stuff on *B*y.

Additionally, many of us block most of those ads so we'd never see them anyway and presumably you wouldn't get credit either since the spam...er...ad server will never get a hit.

I am cool with anything. Since anyone would be able to get the same manuals from me, and put them on their own sites, my task of liberating them, will be accomplished in any case.

I've got a boatload of electronic machine tool control documentation. Some of it just isn't around anymore but the machine tools using the controls are. You'd have to investigate the copyright issue. I'd be happy to provide it.

A way to turn effort into money would be to find related titles for each manual, and have an Amazon Partner click-through for each one. So for a welding manual you'd let the guy click through to buy welding books on Amazon, for MIL-STD-2167 (I think that's the number) you'd let the guy click through to a search on software process & quality assurance, etc.

I don't know how Amazon does it (and I should find out!) but Powell's Books gives me a small cut of anything that someone buys from a web session that starts with one of my Partner's Program links.

I don't know if the money would make the effort worthwhile, but it's a thought...

I have not decided, yet, if I will have the manuals on the filesystem (with static HTML files generated) or in SQL database, but I am leaning towards a database.

Ig, you didn't ask, but ...

The opinion on database best practice for documents and image files seems to be to keep the documents in the file system, and the file paths in the database. Of course it all depends on how you want to serve them up. And so on.

Tom Dacon Dacon Software Consulting "The last geek you'll ever need"

I am not obsessing with making money from this website, it is not going to cost me that much, there are almost no costs to offset (besides possibly buying a new hard drive to hold the database).

Your efforts may help some folks, which is noble.

Otherwise, easy access to free manuals could just spawn more CD sellers.

People that can spend a few bucks more easily than waste time (real or imagined) to search for information, will still buy from the CD sellers.

Really cheap folks will likely appreciate your efforts, or just assume that they are entitled to anything they desire (common in young people today), and are so talented/intelligent in finding information, that they don't have to spend money. It's most likely that cheap folks will donate squat.

WB, I want to kill the manual mafia (when it comes to government documents), more than I care about monetizing this sort of activity.

Also, if everyone is able to download these documents and sell them (as opposed to manual mafiosi putting restrictive terms, watermarks etc on this free stuff), the prices on those disk sets will approach the cost of media.

My estimate of donations that I could possibly get, is under ten $5 donations per year.

Not being a computer guy like yourself, I am curious why if Uncle Sam already has the manuals on their servers, why not just have an index and link to the govenrment site to download the manual? Seems to me that that would require less hardware than storing the files and tying up your server to distribute the large files.

It was already understood that you weren't looking for profit.. really, I don't need constant reminding. I didn't somehow misunderstand your motivation.

Many CD sellers offer a decent deal, as Larry suggested earlier. The last batch of CD/DVDs I bought was about a dozen various Linux OS disks, and they were as cheap as the cost of the disks plus postage.

I bought them because I was on dialup, although I could have asked friends with broadband access to download them, but instead I just bought 'em and had all of 'em in a couple of days. The distros are old versions now, but I still can and do, pull 'em out to stick in almost any computer.

PDF files (and maybe other copying methods) are often fuctup to the point of being worthless, when about an inch of text is missing from the right side, for whatever reason, and the images get shifted to the wrong places. I've found numerous examples of these types of mistakes.

LOGSA is only availible to US citizens, and warns you that they track IP adresses and heavy traffic.