If nobody reads the manual ...
… why are bookshops overflowing with computing books?
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"Nobody reads the manual anyway". If you are a technical author, you have probably been on the receiving end of this comment at some point. It might have come as a friendly put-down from a programmer. However, in less amusing circumstances, it might have come from a project manager trying to justify cuts in resources that affect your work.
As producers of documentation, we technical authors have to believe that our work is useful. Our professional pride, not to mention our livelihood, depends on this being true. However, we would be foolish not admit that many users show a reluctance to pick up the manuals we publish. Yet every time we step into a well-stocked bookshop, we are faced by an apparent paradox. Judging by the numerous shelves devoted to IT, plenty of people are clearly prepared to pay substantial sums for hard-copy information about computing. In many cases, these books are about commercial application software; they seem to be duplicating the information already available in the manuals and online help supplied by software publishers. Why should people want to pay again for information they have already received, effectively for free? And what can we, as technical authors, learn from this?
Some clarification
To make this article simpler to write and read, I have adopted a rather artificial terminology to underline certain distinctions.
- Manuals
- In this article, I use this word exclusively for the printed documentation packaged with software.
- Books
- I use this word for the software documentation that you can buy from a bookshop.
- Technical authors
- These people produce the manuals and are paid by the company that develops the documented software. They are generally members of the software development team.
- Writers
- These people write the books and are paid by book publishers. They do not necessarily have any direct contact with the people who developed the software.
In writing about computing books, I only want to consider those about software applications—the books that you might consider to be in competition with the manuals delivered with the applications. I'm going to ignore the many other computing books that are academic or deal with general technologies rather than commercial products.
Why do people buy computing books?
Naturally, the reasons are diverse. From my review of the stocks in several bookshops and my experience of the software industry, I believe I can suggest some of the principal reasons. However, I have no hard data to support my views.
Because there aren't enough manuals in the office
A typical office has tens or hundreds of licensed users of each of several applications. However, the same office might only have a single copy of the documentation for each application. Multiple license agreements do not work on the basis that every user will receive a personal copy of the user documentation. To keep costs low, corporate customers accept to receive a minimal number of printed manuals with their software purchases. These corporate buyers often prefer to compensate for the lack of documentation by providing users with an initial training course.
After training, users with problems must share the manual or turn to colleagues for assistance. Most applications provide some level of online help, but some users never seem to be comfortable using this. For workers who like paper, who are fed up trying to discover who borrowed the manual last, or who want to learn more about the application at home, a visit to the bookshop often seems the most convenient way to overcome the manual shortage.
Because pirates don't like photocopying
A certain proportion of books sales is due to the pirating of software. If users of illegal software want something more than online help, commercial books provide an alternative to the tedious and illegal chore of photocopying the hundreds of pages of an official manual.
Because manuals ignore total beginners
Before writing manuals, technical authors identify the target audience for their documentation—all the potential users of the software product. Naturally, the audience generally includes a wide range of people with diverse needs. Often the range is too wide to be catered for with the resources available on a documentation project. So authors routinely simplify their work by focusing on the people that they consider to represent the most typical users. As a first short cut, authors often decide to write only for users who already know how to operate computer hardware and how to interact with standard user interfaces.
Many people would consider this decision reasonable. After all, when you buy a car, you do not expect the maintenance manual to provide driving instruction or a summary of the Highway Code. However for certain applications, especially programs aimed at general office or leisure activities, a significant number of users are inexperienced with all computer technology. These people often want more hand-holding and reassurance than authors choose to provide. The stocks in bookshops offer evidence that these people are not comfortable with the terse explanation that is typical of many modern software manuals. I am thinking, in particular, of dummy books and pictorial introductions.
You probably know what I mean by dummy books. Every bookshop has one or more series of books with titles like The Complete Idiot's Guide to ProgramX or ProgramX for Dummies. Such titles clearly advertise that these books are aimed at people who want information spelt out in simple terms. I would like to highlight two features commonly found in dummy books. The language is often more verbose and conversational than you would find in most manuals. And, many dummy books incorporate humour, either in the text or in cartoons. Technical authors generally avoid verbosity and humour in their manuals; they have clear and valid reasons for doing this. However, in making these choices, they omit features that some readers evidently find attractive or comforting.
A number of publishers offer pictorial introductions to popular applications. These books explain the functions of an application through a series of screen shots embellished with explanatory annotations. With good-quality colour printing, these books can look attractive, and they appear an easy way to learn, at least at first glance. I'm sure that pictorial introductions help give beginners confidence during their first tentative steps, but they introduce certain problems. Firstly, beginners might be confused if their desktops and applications are not configured to look identical to the screens illustrated in a book. Also, whenever you have a series of screen shots, a certain amount of the graphical information is repeated and is effectively redundant. After the first few screen shots, readers have increasing difficulty in identifying the differences between the pictures. For these, and other reasons, pictorial introductions are generally only practical and useful when writers limit their explanations to just a fraction of an application's features—generally just the most commonly used ones.
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Copyright © 2003 Stephen P. Reynolds. All rights reserved.
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