The cost of the cd is somewhere between a dime and a quarter. The time involved doing the scanning is the big thing, working at it off and on, it took a couple weeks to scan the Helm's 90 service manual ( six inches thick or about 85 megabytes scanned ) I also scanned a half assed parts list and had to go through girations because instead of black and white it was greyscale and required scanning at 200dpi to be readable. The FSM is scanned at 150dpi so that it would be usable when printed, it actually looks better printed than it looks on screen. 75dpi vs 150dpi. I'm visiting my daughter in Missouri until next Wednesday, when I get back to Virginia I'll attach a few pages to a message so you can see what it looks like. I save everything as pdf files so it will take Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them. It's a freebie, what isn't a freebie is Adobe Acrobat to create the files.