Remember when repair info came in big, heavy books?

Now it's all PDFs that vanish if your drive fails.

4 comments

4 Comments

My 2003 Ford Ranger service manual weighs about eight pounds. What happens when the company stops hosting the PDF for a 2043 model? You just lose access to the knowledge forever. That feels like planned obsolescence for information. At least a book on a shelf can't get a takedown notice.

cora8131mo agoMost Upvoted

Totally agree, that's a scary thought.

oliviajenkins1mo ago

Wait, your manual is eight pounds? That's insane, I mean I knew old car books were big but that's like a small dog. Spencerross makes a good point though, my dad has a stack of repair guides from the 90s in his garage and they're still there when he needs them. If my truck's manual was just a PDF and the link went dead, I'd be totally stuck trying to fix anything. It's scary to think about losing all that info because someone decided to take it offline.

john_lopez1mo ago

My buddy's tractor manual vanished when the site went down.