Ebay
Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Community
Forum Name: News
Forum Discription: Find out the latest news.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=318
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 2:49am
Topic: Ebay
Posted By: emptysilo
Subject: Ebay
Date Posted: 18 February 2007 at 8:43pm
I noticed the courses here are being sold on ebay. It's pretty obvious if you look at the Swahili.
|
Replies:
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 18 February 2007 at 10:14pm
Funny. gdfellows hasn't even finished posting all of the Swahili stuff.
I guess that unbridled "entrepreneurship" is a boon to society, huh? 
How-to-learn-any-language.com has a long thread about digitalizing FSI courses (the brainstorming session that eventually lead to gdfellows creating this site) which also had a tangent about the possibility of certain "entrepreneurs" doing arbitrage. Namely get free "inventory" from a site like this and then resell it. It's already happening, but what can you do... I guess that the only hope is for enough people to "vote with their hands" and click off those sites and onto this site thus cutting off those vultures.
|
Posted By: DemiPuppet
Date Posted: 18 February 2007 at 10:38pm
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I would actually encourage more people to sell the material. The wider the distribution the better. These are in the public domain; I didn't contribute 1 millisecond of time in producing the intellectual content.
I encourage somebody (everybody?) here to package up all the courses, put them on a DVD, and sell it on EBAY for the cost of manufacturing (perhaps a dollar or two). That would cut into the profit of the "vultures" and may also take some of the load off of this site.
My biggest fear is that contributers will decide to stop posting content because somebody is making a profit.
|
Posted By: emptysilo
Date Posted: 19 February 2007 at 1:03am
Yea, I was thinking about selling at $0.00 a link to download the material. Some people might just want a hard copy. Some of those might think they don't have a choice though.
I was curious about the sudden appearance of those courses until I look at the Swahili and it includes just 36 lessons (out of 100). Just the amount finished on the site. Quite a coincidence. haha. I guess they just can't wait.
|
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 19 February 2007 at 9:21am
Originally posted by DemiPuppet
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I would actually encourage more people to sell the material. The wider the distribution the better. These are in the public domain; I didn't contribute 1 millisecond of time in producing the intellectual content.
I encourage somebody (everybody?) here to package up all the courses, put them on a DVD, and sell it on EBAY for the cost of manufacturing (perhaps a dollar or two). That would cut into the profit of the "vultures" and may also take some of the load off of this site.
My biggest fear is that contributers will decide to stop posting content because somebody is making a profit.
|
Somehow I don't think that contributors or potential contributors have been turned off by the idea by others using this site to turn a profit. I for one half-expect someone to eventually resell the Finnish stuff that I bought from NTIS and then donated here. I knew that a site like this would encourage such "entrepreneurship", but given that we are still contributing time and money to do this, it doesn't seem to bother us enough to discourage others from pitching in or looking for other courses to contribute.
Then again, I wouldn't encourage people to sell the material from here knowing damned well that much of the material is freely obtainable here. I also believe that if you really want to buy FSI material, go to NTIS since it's the original stuff and there's always the possibility that you could donate the material later on for posting here.
|
Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 19 February 2007 at 10:45am
I'd suggest GDF or a close associate has a look at http://www.lulu.com/.
You could sell the courses available here only as PDFs as physical books. The lulu printing costs aren't too high: $4.53 + $0.02/page = $13.99 for FSI French unit I :P
Some people don't like reading from a computer screen, and the cost of printing out on an inkjet printer would be comparable (& you don't get a binding.)
The publisher can set the price, but Lulu takes 20% of the profits. So if FSI French was on sale for $24, GDF/whoever would get $8, with $2 going to lulu.
The audio MP3s could be sold on CD (/DVD?) too, for people who don't have great internet connections. (Production costs $5.50 & $7.50)
I think people who prefer to have a book &/ have trouble downloading all the audio would be happy to pay a small margin over the production cost, and subsidise further growth of the site...
|
Posted By: cdaniels
Date Posted: 22 February 2007 at 10:31am
It seems an ideal place for selling/distributing CDs is at Cafepress at http://www.cafepress.com - www.cafepress.com Single Language courses should probably be sold as regular cd audio in addition to, or instead of, mp3 CDs At cafepress.com, CDs are being sold for less than $5, so I assume production costs must also be lower than $5, although I could be wrong.
|
Posted By: smoen
Date Posted: 22 February 2007 at 11:32am
I do know that this issue was brought up to gdfellows a while back, and his repsonse was that some of the courses specifically stated that they could not be used for profit, so even though no profit would be made on something like this, if he doesn't do it, there won't even be an APPEARANCE of profit.
My take is that this is similar to NOT posting DLI courses. If there is no gray area, he (gdfellows) can be sure that there will not be any issues with this site.
I have donated time and materials to this site, and I personally don't have a problem with someone else making a profit by selling them on ebay. The profit that could be made is minimal ($25 per DVD sounds like a lot, but you'd have to sell a lot of them to make any kind of money). Also, they'll stop selling when more and more people realize that the information is available free, and the buyers start realizing that the sellers are, in effect "ripping them off"
Now if someone were to openly state in an ebay posting that these are available for FREE via download, but are offering a service in compiling them on a CD/DVD for $5 or $10 or so, that would really be something.
SteveM
|
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 22 February 2007 at 5:07pm
Originally posted by cdaniels
It seems an ideal place for selling/distributing CDs is at Cafepress at http://www.cafepress.com - www.cafepress.com Single Language courses should probably be sold as regular cd audio in addition to, or instead of, mp3 CDs At cafepress.com, CDs are being sold for less than $5, so I assume production costs must also be lower than $5, although I could be wrong.
|
By this logic, then it's justifiable to charge between $50 and $100 per course since .wav files that are usable on a regular CD player take up a lot more space.
Anyway, a lot of the Discman/Shockwave portable CD players can play .mp3 files on the CDs. I don't think that a lot of people nowadays would want the courses as regular CDs since that just becomes bulky. (FSI courses sold by Audio Forum or learn-how-to-speak.com comprise between 15 and 25 CDs per volume.). One or two CDs for each course (with MP3 files instead of .wav) would mean less clutter.
Moreover, MP3 players are getting cheaper, and the total audio for a course here shouldn't exceed 512MB, so you can easily fit a course on a MP3 player of 512MB or 1GB costing between $40 and $60. (with the exception of Mandarin which has a lot more audio than any of the FSI courses here, and FSI German which was originally compressed at 64kbps rather than 32kbps.)
|
|