Diplodocs - Read the Manual Before You Buy
Friday, December 19, 2008 at 02:15PM From Appscout:
How often have you purchased a device or product, only to get home and discover that setup and configuration is so complicated that it'll take days to finish? Some manufacturers and product designers engineer their products to be easy to use and simple to set up, but that's certainly not always the case; and other times, the owner manual is absolutely no help and you're on your own.
If you find yourself stuck in this kind of situation, check at Diplodocs. You can find over a million user manuals in 26 different languages for a wide variety of products, from computer equipment to sewing machines. You can therefore check out the user manual before you buy, and make sure the product you're interested in is as easy to use as the commercials say it is.
Diplodocs is free, so if you're looking for a manual to show you how to thread your mom's old sewing machine, you don't have to pay some obscure service to go research it, scan it, and e-mail the PDF to you. The beauty of Diplodocs is that it serves as both a reference utility for products and services that you already own and a resource for you to check out the owner's manual of products you'd like to buy before you drop the cash on them.
One of the major benefits to a service like Diplodocs is that you can check product manuals to see if the manual would be helpful when it comes to set up or configure a device, and whether the setup is complicated. You can also use the product manuals of competing products to judge for yourself if one device is significantly more difficult to set up and use than another, which helps you make an educated buying decision before you actually go and purchase the product. Similarly, the service lets people who have inherited a used item or who have lost their owners manual search the site and print out a replacement copy for free.
Simply search for the brand or product name, or pull down the brand and product menus to select specifically which device or product you're looking for. Once the site has found the manual you're looking for, you can preview the first three pages to make sure it's the right manual before downloading. You can download manuals in PDF format after filling in a captcha. All of the 1.2 million manuals that the service supports are free to download.
Diplodocs is completely user-supported, so the site encourages you to scan and upload your own user and product manuals to help the library grow. You can even create an account with the service to upload your manuals and refer back to them if you ever need them. This way the service can work as both a shared service and online storage for digital copies of your own manuals.
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