SafeManuals - Online product-manual repository...

We get a great deal of our information online these days that we used to get in print form: news, encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, language translation, movie times, and so on. However, here's one that's been largely ignored so far - product manuals, those little sheets or booklets that come in the box with your new gizmo, guide you through that first setup, and troubleshoot any problems. Having that booklet there is convenient at the time - but once everything's set up and running, it becomes a liability. It will take up space somewhere and be forgotten, but you don't want to toss it, no, you might need it in the future! (And the trees that went into making that paper weren't free, either.) So, along comes SafeManuals.com, a user-uploaded repository of product manuals, designed to let you throw away (er, recycle) those manuals without worry. It fills the gap left by many manufacturers, who for some reason don't always make their own manuals easy to find online. The question is, will it be able to lead the charge for manufacturers to only put manuals online, and spare the resources required to put printed ones in product boxes? It would require the users to sacrifice that one intial bit of convenience in - but it's something I hope we'd all be willing to do. In the meantime, I'm going to go comb through my library of old manuals and toss anything that's on the site!
[via MakeUseOf and Lifehacker]