Cloud-based bike manuals

[trail guru]

Haynes are doing online maintenance manuals to use on laptops, tablets, etc. which you buy on a subscription basis. Nice thing is they're cloud-based so you don't download the manual, just access it through your browser.

They do one for the SV650 99-08 as well as other bikes.

[flymo]

nice idea, would be a good deal too if it wasnt a subscription for one particular manual. I would consider £33 for a lifetime sub to all manuals they hold.

[_Stretchie_]

Good find, but can you print them?

Might sound daft initially, especially given the nature of them but lets say I am taking apart an engine, or removing the swing arm to swap the bearings or sat underneath my Land Rover changing the transfer and diff oil, there will be a lot of grease and mess unless you change your gloves every time you want to turn the page, which would be worse if you have an iPad or Tablet of some kind with a touch screen.

I'm not knocking them, infact I LOVE this idea (so long as you can print them) I have a load of .pdf service manuals which are great, I keep the Thundercat, BlackBird and SV (curvy) ones on my phone in case there is something I want to look up, but I have them and more on my laptop too and they are fantastic for reading up before hand but I wouldn't use them in electronic format if I was actually doing the work on the bike/car.

Also I am a tart and like the idea of having a shelf full of Haynes manuals, I refer to it as my library

** EDIT **

Posted while I was typing:

nice idea, would be a good deal too if it wasnt a subscription for one particular manual. I would consider £33 for a lifetime sub to all manuals they hold.


I don't know, if you could download it for £10 then it wouldn't be too bad. As a consumer I like the idea that I could pay £33 and then download every manual, just because I wanted to, (I'd like to reads the one about sex, just to see if I'm doing right) but I don't think that wouldn't be great for Haynes themselves.

[_Stretchie_]

Actually I've just looked at it online and actually read it

http://uk.haynes.com/

To use the example of a 2001 SV650s manual:

I can pay £21.90 for a years subscription or £25.80 for a lifetime subscription but for me personally there is no benefit over paying £24.99 for the proper hardback version? (or less if you don't buy from Haynes).

I don't THINK you can download them, I don't THINK you can print them and I THINK you have to have an internet connection, i.e. In my garage where the wireless doesn't reach it would be useless.

I have fired them off an e-mail to ask them what the benefits are of this new format over the old paper version but my first impressions are that it's not for me. I will let you know any reply I get and I will ask the questions above about downloading, printing and caching.

If the subscription was muuuuuuuuch less and you could cache them to your device so you could view them in a non internet area like your garage, or the roadside where your mate has just broken down then I MIGHT be interested but ultimately for I would prefer to OWN the electronic version and maybe pay a small subscription, and I mean SMALL like £5 for the year maybe for extra functionality of better hints and tips or videos to show exactly where that pesky bolt is, or exactly how to remove a part.

The Haynes for my Civic says that to remove the brake servo you just remove all the pipes, undo the securing bolts from the cabin and it'll slide out..... Slide out my RRRRRR's, I'd love to see the video of exactly how they slid it out

[craig dow]

i downloaded the manual yesterday and put a link on here , i just saved it to my docs and you can open it up any time and look at what you need , and also you can print it out , id did that at work as i think it was about 700 pages , work can afford that lol , but best thing is it didnt cost me a penny ,

[timwilky]

If as Craig said you can download and print then great. I don't like scanned copies as they have lost resolution and overly grey etc. Even better if they are the full colour image? or did he download the scanned manual?

The advantage why oil cover a load of pages when you could just print the individual pages you need.

[trail guru]

Ref the points raised so far here's a bit of info on what Haynes Online manuals are and what you can do with them....

They're not downloads but cloud-based so you do need a browser and Internet access. If you've downloaded a 'Haynes Manual' PDF it's a scanned (and scammed) copy.
You can print them.
They're all colour, searchable and based on the printed versions.
They update automatically when new editions are published.

Are they a good alternative to the printed one? Now there's a question....