A few months ago I bought a household item from Amazon.com and was impressed by the fact that they gave me access to the manual as soon as I bought it, before it even shipped. This is such a great idea and could be taken so much further.
If there were a good centralized source (could be Amazon, but probably not) where I could maintain an index of all your major household items (appliances, vacuums, dictionaries to look up how to spell “vacuum”), I’d use it. Especially if the manufacturers followed some standardized set of conventions that would allow the end user to always see the most recent version of the manual. Bonus: e-mail/RSS alerts when a manual is updated. Bonus bonus: make all the manuals searchable.
If an item were bought in the store, it could have a UPC-ish code to plug into this centralized service so that you didn’t have to search for your specific model.
I’ve put the idea out there. Now, somebody build it.
Posted in Consumer Commentary