H. E. R. P. & E. S.

This is not a new issue. Publishers and manufacturers of all stripes have been trying to control the resale market since the first person decided to buy used instead of new.

They grey market will always exist – just maybe not on Ebay.

So how does this evade the First Sale Doctrine? Is there a lawyer in the house? Scott?

The Homeschool Tracker people — wonderfully helpful in every other way — also say you can’t resell. Why do software companies think they’re the only ones who can ban resale? I suppose it might be because sometimes you can use their products without the disk, so theoretically people could install a program and then sell the disk, but people who are going to do that aren’t going to worry about whether the company bans resales or not.

It’s not just software companies. The book and music industries would love to ban resales.

Say it ain’t so!

First EBay bans teachers’ editions, now Rosetta Stone?

HSLDA is working on solving the first problem (for our own members). I’ll add this to the stack.

I’m using it through our library for free. I didn’t buy it and now for sure I don’t plan on buying it.

Awwww, man, I was just getting to buy Spanish from them. Any other good language programs out there?

Oops, should have been “getting ready to buy”.

So, another one for the This Little Piggy site, I guess.

Here’s my opinion:
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It would only work for languages in which translations of English-language books are available, so it does limit the number of languages. Still, it was a fun way to learn.

My only complaint about the Learnables company is they don’t have Italian.

FWIW, Rosetta Stone requires you to have the disk in the dirve when using it.

The only reason I’m willing to pay the $200 is because I know I can get close to that when I resell it. We’ve got Spanish I and II but decided to go French this year. So far, I like it.

Still, there are always venues for things in high demand. Vegsource is probably OK with it, and there’s a fair amount of changing of hands in my local county on the homeschooling network Yahoo groups. For something that popular you don’t need the big guys.

We’ve had very good results with Pimsleur — enough that after the first series in Mandarin, the Chinese we met in Shanghai complemented us on our “perfect Beijing” pronunciation (to be sure, they were surprised that Americans would try to speak Chinese at all). I got around reasonably well on a business trip in Panama after about half of the first series in Spanish. Pimsleur is geared toward conversation, though, no reading at all in Mandarin and not much in Spanish.

FWIW American Airlines reimburses employees for Berlitz programs, and the Department of Defense uses Rosetta Stone (the Puerto Rican translator I met also had to learn Arabic, for example). We’ve done The Learnables too and can talk about fat men eating spaghetti with burglars in German, but I liked Pimsleur better myself.

As unschoolers we don’t buy or use curriculum, but FWIW this showed up on our local list today via FL’s “parent educator” association (FPEA):

I’m sure you’ve heard about the ban on teacher’s editions, answer keys, or curriculum that contain them at the big auction giant. This impacts the homeschool community and we decided to do something about it. Glad Mind Education Auction (www.gladmind.com) is now available as an alternative, created in response to the news. . .

For more information, here is a link to our press release

Figures! I just actually had a bid in on Ebay for just that. I never heard a word about the bid after my confirmation. It just vanished…not sold to any bidder. But I see many other RS copies available on there still. Weird.

Any good advice for people looking to brush up on their German?

Kim

Kim, I plan to try out Audible.de for audiobooks auf Deutsch. I currently use Audible.com for English audiobooks.