I'm looking around and can't find a catchall thread for links to service manual sites, please post any sites that host free manuals! https://www.archive.org https://www.mediafire.com/?n1o0nsxmy4kho https://www.nodevice.com/ https://manymanuals.com/ https://elektrotanya.com/keres https://freeservicemanuals.info/en/ https://www.audioservicemanuals.com/ https://akdatabase.org/AKview/index.php https://audiocircuit.dk/ https://www.manualslib.com/ Hifiengine.com and Vinylengine.com are great but sometimes it's impossible to get a membership to get access.
And then there are the sites you didn't mention which are the pay sites. People charging ridiculous amounts of money for paper
Sometimes they are a necessity, in the early days of the internet it was too hard to post full SM's, now they are uploaded daily, I have a few but it takes a long time to scan and save. I did correct it to say "free" manuals.
It takes money and time to scan a manual with high quality, especially if there are fold-out schematics. From what I've seen, most free sites give you low-quality scans with resolution that's too low to read everything on the schematic. Or they have awkward gaps between the schematic pages. And some of those sites require you to view ads or unzip files. And who knows, some of them might be infected with malware. Member "Superduper" owns the Analog Alley site, and yes it costs money but you're guaranteed a good manual that you can actually read.
I don't agree here saving a 10 - 15 page document costs little about two - three euros in any tobacconist or bookstore, in fact maybe I exaggerated with the price because saving in pdf costs less.. then it's okay that it has a cost... But in the end I buy a file with the photos... not the original photos themselves and not even a reprint on paper... but a file. To make a pdf file... phone with 13 Mp camera and any application to cut photos and save them in pdf... We are all capable but not all of us will resell as if we were the manufacturer.. in fact if it were Sony in person or Aiwa or any other proprietary brand I would also be happy to pay more because I'm buying from the manufacturer, but paying someone who has put aside the diagrams in these years and now resells them at a higher price.. NO..Thanks this is what I think ...
It's a free market, just like boomboxes, you'll get the market value, I have no issue with people trying to make money. I'm sure some of the owners have been holding on to these things for years taking up valuable space. But yea, scanning can take a long time, I have maybe 50 or more pretty cool obscure manuals but I don't scan any cuz it takes forever, especially if they are thick and you don't want to remove staples. It might take a few days to get them all done. Obviously alot of the hosting sites scrape other PDF sites and use the same manuals, if the first generation is from 20 years ago the quality might be horrible or pages might be missing to save upload space.
The people who sell manuals had to buy them from someone else. And then they spent time scanning them, listing them on a website (which costs money for hosting fees), and set up a shopping cart and all that. So yes they deserve a profit for that. The photos you posted are acceptable, but some of the numerals are fuzzy. A scan provides better quality, in my opinion. And regardless if someone uses a scanner or a camera, they still have to stitch together those files into a single file, while trying to avoid disruptions between the schematic drawings. All of that work is labor, and labor deserves a profit.
