money making idea

Years ago one of my consulting jobs morphed into translating "Chinglish" manuals for VFDs into versions that can be read by normal people in North America, because my client was brand-labeling a VFD made in Taiwan. Having a manual that people here could understand was a sales feature for their version vs the other brand-labeled versions of the same drives.

I did actually get paid for doing that work, but the copyrights were kept by the company that hired me. Nonetheless, I see my handiwork replicated in a half dozen different manuals for Asian VFD brands that are not even remotely related to the company I did the work for. That company has totally thrown in the towel on trying to enforce their copyrights, the lawyers charge more than they could ever hope to recover.

mk42 said:

Agreed.

I find that manuals tend to either be written by people who are trying to hide how little they know about the topic, or by people who know so much they have forgotten what it felt like to start at level 0.

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It is very hard to write a good manual for someone that is starting at zero, but is though, complete, yet concise. My favorite example is K&R C book. It is very thin. About a third of most other C books. Yet it seems to have everything in it. Whenever it covers a topic, all the prerequisite topic are covered earlier in the book. It explains things once (not multiple times), but thoroughly. After reading multiple books math, controls, programming or user manuals, it is obvious that few people have this ability for the subject matter they present.

After reading through many manuals, I write my own notes/manual, but even then, the notes probably aren't good enough to help to many other people. Since I write for my future self, it seems like after reading the manuals, I either assume that in the future I will not be back close to zero, and I don't put the information that I needed at zero. Yet, I don't realize what I know now is important that I will forget in the future. Later on, (usually months later) when I have to repeat job, or am just trying to figure out why or how something works, I go back to my notes and realize how much I forget, and how much my notes suck. But they are better (to me) than not having them at all. I've also been surprised to google for the answer to something only to find that the answer to my question was posted by me a long time ago.