First I am not one of the ones selling these players on e-bay.

Why would the company care since it moves more product? It is thinking like this that causes sales to die on products. It seems everybody on e-bay uses the text from web sites and graphics. I am sure IBM does not care if somebody uses a graphic from their site showing a picture of a hard drive. It promotes their product.

It is really sad to see such a high quality MP3 player go out but the way that EMPEG/RIO have handled sales on the player, I am not surprised.

As a reseller of mp3 products (www.funmp3players.com) I wanted to carry the empeg in my online store. Forbes magazine even did an article on mp3 players in which they interviewed me and I told them the Rio Car was the best mp3 player on the planet

(see http://www.funmp3players.com/temp/forbes.jpg)

When I contacted EMPEG/RIO about reselling the product, I was told that it would only be available off their web site. This was a huge mistake not allowing resellers to sell a product, not very many people are going to find out about it and sales are going to suffer. I understand at first when demand was high and they were not able to produce them fast enough (back when people had to take a number and wait months to get one) but why did they not allow resellers to try and sell them when they had hundreds of units in stock?

I wished that I could have sold the product off my web site but now it looks like nobody will be selling them.