My buddy Mike was on a service call last year for some old industrial motor. He spent an hour flipping through his greasy 1992 code book in the van, trying to find the right diagram. The pages were stuck together from some soda spill. He finally found it, but the whole section was torn out. Had to call the shop and wait for someone to text him a picture. Total nightmare compared to now.
Yeah, the old greasy manual thing is a special kind of pain. I've seen guys use a wrench to prop open a page because the binding gave out. Or trying to read pencil notes from 1987 that just say "bad." A clean PDF search beats trying to unstick pages that are basically glued together with old coffee and mystery grease.