BellaOnline Forums Education Homeschooling Ebay textbook policy

I didnt realize that this wasn't common knowledge until this week when I was swamped with emails. I apologize for not sharing the info when I first read about it earlier this year.

Anyhow...

ebay is banning the sale of teacher guides, including those included in homeschool programs.

I heard the HSLDA is making an auction site for HSLDA members only. I'm certainly not paying $100 and lying on my application about my faith just to use their auctions.

I use vegsource.com/homeschool to sell now, and it saves me money since there are no fees.

What does everyone else plan on using to sell? Have you decided to boycott ebay or will you still buy and sell? What do you feel about the policy?

meg

I'm relatively new to this whole thing, but I'm surprised they were able to sell them in the first place. I bought books directly from Holt Publishing and I had to answer a few questions before they would sell them to me. One publisher had far too much rigormarole for me to bother with so I can see the point in having other resources to buy/sell from.

I try not to generalize or make sweeping statements, but ... kids today have alot of access to credit cards/money and the ability to "find" anything (including teacher editions of their current textbooks). I can see why the policy is beneficial for them.

Hard call - what's good for them makes life a bit more painful for us.

I agree that selling teacher's editions of regular textbooks used in public schools is probably a bad idea, since the only ones buying them at auction would most likely be students wanting to cheat, but for textbooks that are designed for homeschooling, it's rediculous. The only people that would be buying those books would be parents teaching their kids. It's not like they couldn't put those books in a separate catagory or something to allow homeschoolers to continue to utilize their services.

I don't think I'm going to boycot e-bay over it because there are so many other things you can still get there for your homeschooling needs and wants, but it still sucks!

All of the homeschool groups I work with have major used/new book sale/trade opportunities twice (or more often) each year. You'll find other homeschoolers trading/selling and usuallly some of the major curriculum pubishers/book dealers will attend these too. Its terrific way to find/sell books without having to hassle with copyright regulations and red tape with online resellers.

Well, think of this as well...by the time a school discards it's texts and offers them to the public they have already purchased new texts, so giving a child a teacher's text is futile. There is a chance another school will still be using it, but it's not that likely.

Meg

here are some news results for the ebay textbook thing, including other sites to sell and buy at:

[url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.

Here is an even better article:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_470203.html