Sep 1129
Another Killer iPad Use: Storing My User Manuals
September 29th, 2011
I have a giant stack of user manuals in my house. Manuals for the stove, the microwave, the gas fireplace, the digital camera, the DVR, the game consoles, yada, yada. Yes, I’m the type of person who actually reads user manuals so I can use my devices better and do my own troubleshooting when there’s a problem. When I don’t have a user manual for a device, I look for it online and bookmark or download the PDF.
Well, I’m going paperless with my user manuals because they’re all going into my iPad.
Just imagine this: all (or most) of my manuals in one portable device, searchable, and including a dictionary and ability to write notes. Here’s how to do it:
- Download the PDF to the computer that you use to synch and back up your iPad.
- Drag the PDF to your Books collection in iTunes
- The next time you synch your iPad, voila!, the user manual is now on your iPad
This means I can get rid of the ugly stacks in my house and I never have to worry that a manufacturer will remove a user manual for an aging device. Want to learn more? This article from MakeUseOf shows you how to paginate, bookmark and annotate in iBooks. Love it!
September 29th, 2011 at 9:47 am
Great tip Joanna! I too actually read user manuals, and having them available online is one of the wonderful things about the Internet. I had an “Aha! moment” a few years ago about the ubiquity of information on the Web a few years ago due to a user manual. My daughter was having difficulty figuring out how something worked on an electronics device and since I was at the computer at the time I simply Googled the model number and within a minute or so had opened the PDF manual, searched inside for the function in question, and found the answer. Then it hit me—I had the paper copy of the manual and knew exactly where it was filed, but it was simply more convenient to go online than walk upstairs to the file cabinet, and it was much faster to search within the digital PDF than thumb through the hard copy. Information really is at our fingertips now :-)
December 13th, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Hi Joanna,
Great post! I have so many user manuals that I have a separate file cabinet for them. I think I am done collecting them though as most companies now over manuals in PDF format. I just read about a new company called Dozuki (www.dozuki.com), they are launching a cloud based service for companies to create and distribute user manuals.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/ifixit-launches-dozuki-a-cloud-service-for-manuals/
Cool Stuff!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.