Re: saving trees (printing)

["H. Christopher Christner" <cchris -at- toptechwriter -dot- us>]

A few more thoughts on PDF docs. Cutting out the paper's a good way to
reduce costs, and, depending on your audience, shouldn't be a problem with
customers. 

But when it is a problem, yikes! Quark found out the hard way when they
released version 6 without printed manuals. Customers were outraged and it's
still gets mentioned on their forum after two years. Also, the lack of
printed docs is considered a negative in CNET's reviews (see
http://tinyurl.com/btrbl, for example).

FYI,
Chris

> Hi Bill,
> 
> We've been distributing our user docs as PDFs on CD for several years and it
> was a good solution based on who our customers were (ISPs and enterprise MIS
> people). But we're marketing VoIP products for consumers and have started
> getting comments from customers saying they wanted paper docs, so now we're
> printing a hardcopy quick start guide to go along getting started and software
> guides on the CD. The quick start guides are printed on two bi-folded
> letter-size sheets and have been well received.
> 
> --Chris
> 
> On 1/5/06 10:23 AM, "Bill Swallow" <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> 
>> I'm interested in cutting down the number of pages in our printed
>> manuals in favor of electronic delivery (PDF, HTML, c-s Help systems,
>> etc.). I wanted to get a feel from people who have done this as to
>> what the customer reaction was. Please don't reply with comments on
>> the value of print and so forth (at least not to this thread)... I'm
>> just looking for customer reactions. We're doing our own audience
>> analysis, content analysis, and so forth, but having some outside info
>> will also help in our decisions.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> --
>> Bill Swallow

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