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Comment by McKayDavis | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see a company go out of business, but I applaud the owners of Manuals Plus [1] for making such a large donation to the Internet Archive.

To provide some more context about what the actual contents of the archive includes, a description is on their about page [2]:

"Manuals Plus buys and sells Electronic Test & Measurement Equipment Manuals. We stock over 400,000 manuals at our Westminster, Maryland location. Our inventory consists of Operator, Service, Calibration, and Programming manuals."

[1] http://www.manualsplus.com/

[2] http://www.manualsplus.com/About.php

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The fate of the manuals are not known to be heading to the Internet Archive just yet. It's quite likely they'll end up there though. At least for digitalizing and scanning them in.

I however join you in applauding Manuals Plus in letting these go. It must be hard for them.

The way I understand it, the company behind the manualsplus.com service (Ridge Equipment Company, Inc.) isn't going out of business. The issue is they needed to move to a new location and it didn't make economic sense for them to continue with the manuals part of their business when considering the cost of outfitting the new facility for their storage and moving the material.

If that's the case, they should be getting a nice tax deduction for the donation, right?

.. which might be more than they would have gotten for them in an auction. Clever.

Likely not, the ones they are throwing in the dumpster are making a statement about the estimated value of the rest of them.

We stock over 400,000 manuals

The original estimate[1] was only(!) 25k, so that explains the need to order more boxes.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683

Part of the difference could be number of manuals versus number of different manuals. The original blog post talked about there being multiple cookies of some manuals.

Part of it could also be ronding up for advertising a number they do not know exactly. A firm like this may not have kept perfect tally of their stock ("hey guys! It's January again. The guy from accounting needs to know what we have. It's counting time!")

A big part of it was that they were definitely further up a year or two ago and have been trying to fire sale out manuals as they go. The website has been updated infrequently so the number is not as large anymore.

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