iFixit, the site famous for its gadget teardowns and repair manuals, is launching a new business to provide manufacturers, how-to sites, or even individuals the ability to build their own library of online service manuals. Called Dozuki, the new effort extends iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens' goal to make do-it-yourself repairs a common practice.

Service manuals for the Internet Age

Wiens' logic is very simple. "Service manuals are stuck in the 20th century. We're going to fix that," he told Ars in an interview.

iFixit already solved this problem for itself over the last five years. The company originally started as a source of parts and how-to guides for repairing iPods, iPhones, and Macs. When each new Apple product is released, iFixit goes to great lengths to secure a sample and immediately disassemble the entire device to discover its parts and how it is put together.

A trip to Africa in 2010 inspired Wiens to expand iFixit's mission beyond Apple gear. Wiens viewed first-hand how our consumer culture creates mountains of toxic electronic waste from scores of discarded VCRs and computer monitors. "Repair is better than recycling," Wiens told Ars last year. "We can become vastly more sustainable by fixing things when they break rather than mining them for raw materials."

So iFixit created a sort of Wikipedia for do-it-yourself repairs based on its own work as well as with the help of hundreds of tinkerers on the Web. In addition to MacBooks and iPhones, iFixit has repair manuals for Polaroid cameras, Dodge minivans, Xbox consoles—even the lowly toaster. Wiens called it "Repair 2.0."

"When we started five years ago, we realized we needed a collaborative service manual tool," Wiens said. "There are all sorts of interesting things you need to do when teaching people to do real things—link in parts and tools, and have a consistent format so it's intuitive for the user, among other things."

Unfortunately, no existing publishing platform really fit the bill. "The closest thing was Instructables," Wiens said. "They're nice guys, and they do a good job—but it's really just a photo slideshow. We needed much more sophistication."

Guidebook: modern technical documentation software

All along the way, iFixit created a platform called Guidebook to build and host its repair manuals. Guidebook is the Web-based tool that iFixit uses to publish its teardowns, which typically involve two or more people simultaneously adding and editing information while a technician disassembles some new gadget. It's also the same platform that iFixit user base uses to write and edit repair manuals of their own, which get added to the site.

In addition to including a system to track suggested edits and updates, Guidebook includes the ability to list necessary tools and supplies. It also has a facility to link to related repair guides or list what Wiens called "dependencies." For instance, if you need to replace the optical drive in a MacBook, you can link to instructions for removing the bottom cover instead of rewriting those all over again.

Additionally, the platform includes an integrated Q&A tool called Answers that allows users to ask questions which are then answered by iFixit staff or more experienced users. Those questions and answers are collected along with photos and detailed instructions for any repairs. Sometimes those questions inspire edits in existing repair guides, other times they may result in a new guide altogether.

"Guidebook is modern technical documentation software," Wiens explained. "You can use it to write a single how-to guide, or a complete service manual for an automobile. It's working phenomenally well for us—we've got the largest collection of service manuals online."

According to Wiens, traditional user and service manuals suffer from a number of problems. They often lack real-world photos, contain abstract instructions, include errors or inconsistencies, and—for service manuals in particular—are sometimes incomplete. "And they're both stuck in one of two formats: paper, and PDF," Wiens said.

Since the company launched its "Repair 2.0" initiative last year, it has received numerous requests to use its platform. "People kept asking us if they could run their own iFixit for their own products," Wiens told Ars. "We realized there was a huge opportunity for helping manufacturers publish better manuals."

Enter Dozuki

That's when Wiens and his cohorts came up with the idea for Dozuki. The hosted platform allows any company—or anyone, really—to set up a repair guide or how-to site for a monthly subscription fee. "Small companies can post just a few manuals, all the way up to larger manufacturers that have so many products they might need a site as large as iFixit," Wiens said.

Dozuki is launching with three monthly plans to start. The "Garage" plan hosts up to 50 manuals for $99 per month. The plan is limited to one author, though additional authors can be added for an extra fee. It includes public hosting for the manuals on Dozuki's site, along with free PDF generation.

Smaller manufacturers can opt for the $249 "Workshop" plan, which allows up to three authors and 150 manuals. Manuals can be marked public or private—for instance, to limit access to authorized service technicians—and can be linked to a custom domain name (think "support.dell.com").

Finally, the deluxe "Factory" package offers larger companies a "top-of-the-line documentation engine" for $499 per month. This includes support for five authors and hosting an unlimited number of manuals.

There's even a free plan that, for now, is limited to three manuals.

A unique ability of Dozuki is an integrated API that allows customizing the display of manuals to match a client's existing site, or to embed the manual into other webpages. It also makes it easy to build an iPhone or iPad app so users can access the repair information from their mobile device while working. (Code is available to build an app for iOS, but the API doesn't preclude building apps for Android or any other mobile platform.)

Manufacturers in particular may be leery of trusting all their service information to a cloud-based service, but Wiens told Ars that the Guidebook platform already has that covered. The hosting runs on servers that are backed up to multiple data centers. And, once guides and manuals are generated, the content isn't locked to Dozuki's system.

"I think it's really important that people own their data, and we make sure they always have access to it," Wiens said. iFixit worked with O'Reilly Media to build an open, XML-based document interchange format called oManual. Guidebook also includes the ability to export any manual as a PDF.

In addition to developing the oManual format, however, O'Reilly is putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak. The Guidebook platform powers O'Reilly's Make Projects website, which includes a variety of DIY how-tos like building a rocket-launched camcorder.

"Documentation is underrated, but it's really important. We've really changed the status quo—the Apple world is completely different because our manuals are so useful. We are going to give everyone else the technology that allowed us to do it," Wiens told Ars.

"We're hoping that by getting a large number of companies working in a standard format, the technical documentation industry will improve."