Service manuals for free, kind of

"Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man, now..."

tl;dr: See if your local library subscribes to some of the professional auto repair databases, like Chilton Library or Auto Repair Reference Center. With some effort, you may be able to get a good approximation of the factory manual for free. You might even be able to read it from home, rather than going to the library.

Factory manuals
When I bought my Prius in 2001, I also bought all four (see below) factory manuals from Toyota. Over the years, they have probably saved me a lot more in shop labor and hassle than the $100 or so they cost back then. If you bought a Gen1 used, or if you're a shop that doesn't do a lot of Gen1 work, you may or may not want to spend the money on the factory manuals.

The four books are volumes 1 and 2 of the repair manual, a volume of just the wiring diagram, and a volume called "New Car Features". For everyday work you can get by with just the two volumes of repair manual. The repair manual also has the wiring diagrams for individual systems on the car, so you don't need the wiring diagram, but the wiring diagram has the whole car in one book. The New Car Features manual explains in reasonable detail how all the systems on the car work... if you were trying to sell a Gen1 to an engineer, you'd show him or her this book. You don't really need it to fix a Gen1, but some of the theory of operation is interesting, at least to me.

What you really want is a PDF of the factory manuals, with an index and hyperlinks and all that. I don't know where to get one of those, other than by buying the factory manuals, cutting off the spines, and feeding them into a flatbed scanner. It's roughly 2000 pages total, and each one is double-sided, so start soon.

What the library has
What you can probably get from the library is a series of individual PDFs, from one to several pages each, that are copied from the factory manual. The sites are designed to be somewhat resistant to scraping the whole thing, but it's not too hard to look up the specific pages you want as you need them. Protip: always save a copy of the PDF locally, renaming it to something that makes sense if you need to.

Sometimes you have to go to the library in person to use these databases; if you do that, take a blank USB stick to save the documents to. When you get home, copy the documents to your PC, tablet, or phone, and then format the USB stick again. If the only option at the library is printing them to dead tree slices, bug the library administration about coming into the 20th century sometime soon.

My local library subscribes to two "professional" repair databases that I can access from home: Auto Repair Reference Center from EBSCO, and Chilton Library. You probably need to use both of them to get a good approximation to the factory manual. I can use them from home if I go to the library's web site first, log in with my library card, and then click on the links on the library's site. (If I just go directly to the Chilton or ARRC site, without going through the library site first, they want money.)

This may just be a quirk of my library, but they don't currently list the "Auto Repair Reference Center" on their site (they used to). They do list a "Small Engine Repair Reference Center", also from EBSCO - if I log into the library's site, click on the small-engine link to go to EBSCO's site, and then go to the auto-repair link on EBSCO's site, it still works and I can read the auto-repair stuff.

Auto Repair Reference Center - EBSCO
The Auto Repair Reference Center is a little better at volume 2 of the factory manual, which is how to take things off the car and put them back on again. It has some of the diagnostic information from volume 1 of the factory manual - this can be found under the top-level heading "Repair Information". Look for the articles that start with "R.M. 2001:: Diagnostics:".

There is another top-level heading "Diagnostic Information", which even offers a list of "DTC Codes"*, but the descriptions of the codes are generic junk and not very useful. It doesn't include the P3xxx codes, either.
*which you can look up over a digital DSL line connected to an automatic ATM machine

The top-level heading "Diagrams" gives you some of the wiring diagrams - at the local library's site, the diagrams won't preview in your browser, but if you click the "download PDF" link, you can read them that way. These diagrams are the Mitchell aftermarket ones, not the factory ones, but are probably good enough. They do include the wiring for the hybrid system.

The "Bulletins" section gives you the service bulletins. At this late date, they probably aren't too helpful to use for arguing with a dealer, but at least you can read them.

The "Specifications" section has things like torque values, clearances, etc. Often these are also given in the procedure for the specific component they apply to, but this gives you everything in one spot.

Chilton Library
The Chilton Library is a little better, I think, at volume 1 of the factory manual - the diagnostic stuff. To get to that, click on "Repair" at the top of the page, then "Diagnostics", "Diagnostic Routines", "All Configurations", click on the particular trouble code you are interested in, and then on "View Image". You should get a PDF that has the troubleshooting flowchart from volume 1 of the factory manual.

The "Component Locations" entries under "Repair" usually give you a PDF of a whole page from the factory manual with an exploded diagram and torque values for the fasteners. Some of the articles consist of native text (not a scan from the manual), coupled with pictures scanned from the manual at about 20 DPI - in other words, jaggy and blurry.

The "Bulletins" top-level entry gives you the service bulletins. The "Maintenance" top-level entry gives you a maintenance schedule, but I wonder about it a little bit - for instance, it has "differential oil" as a line item, but I'm pretty sure on a Prius that the differential runs in the same fluid as the rest of the transmission.

Other sources
Sometimes the factory manuals come up on Ebay. If they are in good shape, they might be a good deal.

I don't know if Toyota even still sells the manuals. If you want to check, the numbers for the 2001 edition are RM778U1 and RM778U2 for the repair manual, EWD414U for the wiring diagram, and NCF182U for the New Car Features manual.

Mitchell has a series of manuals that shops can subscribe to. The local library has this on a computer, but you have to go to the library in person to use it. I tried it a couple of years ago for another car and as I recall, it was difficult to get it to cough up a PDF that you could save to a USB drive. The library where I used to live also had Mitchell, but only on dead tree slices, and only for library use (bring nickels for the Xerox machine). The paper ones were about as good as you could get from an "aftermarket" manual.

You will also see "repair manual" CDs sold on Ebay for $20ish. Usually these are crappy scans of a Haynes or Chilton paper manual, or rips of ARRC, Chilton, or Mitchell online manuals. Depending on who did the scan or the rip, the stuff on the CD is probably for the right car and may be complete. I haven't ever bothered with buying one of these.

And yeah, the library isn't really "free" - in many places in the US, you pay for it through property taxes or a sales tax. But since you have to pay for it, you might as well get some use out of it. Also, if the library's resources do help you out, it's worth mentioning it to the person at the reference desk or the front desk... they like to know what people find useful when planning their budget.

I hope this helps!

 

Good point.

This is probably where some of the PDF pages on the ARRC and Chilton sites are coming from, then. I noticed some of the PDFs had hyperlinks in them, but they didn't work; probably they are designed for the directory layout on techinfo.toyota.com.

Toyota offers a 2-day subscription to techinfo.toyota.com for $20. If the repair manual for the car you are interested in is old enough to be PDFs, that's probably enough time to download and save the whole thing, even if you have to click on all the links yourself. If it's for a later car that doesn't have PDFs, that may be more difficult. (Not everybody knows how to drive wget or an equivalent spider.)

You can get owner's manuals as PDFs for free at techinfo.toyota.com, too. You don't have to log in or make an account or anything; just click on the "manuals" link and select year, make, and model. You can also get a maintenance schedule and a couple of other things, too. (I checked 2001 and 2009, because those are the two Prii I am most likely to work on, but I'm pretty sure this applies to other years, too.)

Good find! Looking at the public information there, that site is for the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard, both active duty and retired. You can log in with a CAC or with DS Logon. It says the equivalent sites for other branches are:
Army Libraries :: PRDCTN for the Army

Air Force Libraries
for the Air Force
http://www.militaryonesource.mil for "DOD service members and families"

@Brian in Tucson also has a good link to Rock Auto. I've shopped there before, for other cars, and gotten reasonable service.

I am not associated with any companies or sites mentioned.