My Experience with Emanualonline.com

Anyone who chooses to work on their own vehicle would love to have the factory service manuals. As nice as Haynes and Chilton are, there is just no replacing the detail of the actual factory service manuals. The problem is automakers don’t generally make them available, so at-home wrench turners are left to find them from secondary sources.

Factory Service Manuals are Hard to Find

The best source of factory service manuals I can find is Ebay. On Ebay, you can often find the print versions of the manuals which is really the only way to know you are getting the real thing. The catch is they are typically $500-$600.

A Lot of Online Factory Service Manuals are Scams

So what happens when a lot of people want to buy something that isn’t readily available? Prices for the real thing go up and enterprising people attempt to fill the void with knock-off versions of the product. If the knock-offs have some success, then next come the scammers.

I definitely have not given my money to all of the larger websites and “we will mail you a CD with the manuals on it” websites just to find out for sure if they are scams. But a few searches on BBB and through reddit threads will tell you that they are scams indeed. The one website that everyone knows of and has decidedly mixed reviews is emanualonline.com.

I Bought Service Manuals from Emanualonline.com

I spent a lot of time reading reviews of emanualonline.com and they all pointed to the site being legit. There are lots of negative ones to be sure, but they mostly have to do with how the files are delivered and what happens when you need customer service.

It appears that a lot of the repair manuals are delivered as PDFs and that, of course, is what people want. But some of the repair manuals are delivered in OVA format that requires you to download another reader program called VirtualBox. Many reviewers see this as a virus or a bait and switch tactic and then write scathing reviews of the website. Other reviewers point out that OVA files are legit and VirtualBox is free to download.

I decided to give it a try for my 2013 Chevy Avalanche. The repair manuals on Ebay for my truck are $600 and emanualonline.com claims to have them in downloadable form, which is easier, for $36. I figured the worst that would happens is I would be out $36. I purposely used a credit card so I could dispute the charges just in case it didn’t work out and I hit the purchase button.

So What Did I Get from Emanualonline.com?

I didn’t get exactly what I expected, but what I did get was useful and well worth $36. The repair manual I got is for all GM 1500 platform vehicles from 2007-2013. Most of the specific information in the manual is aimed at the Escalade, though there are few Avalanche specific sections. Since I have nothing to compare it to, I don’t know if this is how GM did it or whether there was a more specific Avalanche manual and this isn’t it. The Escalade and the Avalanche are mechanical twins, so I’m not sure it really matters.

Inside of a 135mb zip file, I got 73 different PDFs along with another zip file full of wiring diagrams. Each PDF seems to be a section from the manuals pertaining to a specific part of the vehicle. The PDFs feel like someone ran the books through a scanner as there are odd page breaks and things that I seriously doubt appear in the actual factory service manuals. But the pages do link up and appear to be consecutive pages from something.

My only real issue with the download, and this isn’t Emanualonline’s fault at all, is there is no way to find what you are looking for without just plowing through the various PDFs. The pages appear to be written with the idea you are reading it on a computer and can click links to the appropriate next part of the manual, but since these are PDFs, that obviously isn’t possible.

So you are left to pick the PDF with a title that sounds sort of like where your question might be answered and start scrolling. A keyword search function or a reference section would be a game changer, but since it isn’t here I’m assuming the original manuals aren’t set up that way. But if you are patient, there is a massive amount of information in these PDFs.

Would I Buy From Emanualonline.com Again?

I would. For $36, I feel like a got a wealth of information. I don’t know if I really got every page of the factory service manuals, but I got a lot of technical information that I didn’t have before and I feel like what I received was absolutely worth the $36 investment. If you work on cars for a living, you probably need the real things as finding specific information in these PDFs is too tedious. But for the DIY mechanic, this is excellent value.