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@kalessin said in Premium Edition VS Prepub VS Other e-Book Platforms:
@harmlessdave said in Premium Edition VS Prepub VS Other e-Book Platforms:
Do you not ever use the catch-up month titles to read older volumes that are no longer available as pre-pubs? I've only been a JNC member for 14 months so that has been very valuable for trying out older series.
For pre-pubs, I can understand not wanting to read the parts as they are released, but it's also useful to read a new title once it's finished to see if you like it instead of buying blind. There have been several recent titles that looked promising. They weren't bad but were not my cup of tea, so I'm happy to have saved $6 on them.
I have never read any pre-pubs and have no interest in doing so. If a book looks interesting, I buy it, just like with any series which is published by someone other than JNC. And if the option were buying the books from Kobo vs paying for the subscription, the money saved by buying them from Kobo would easily outstrip the cost of occasionally picking up a book that turned out to be a dud. And I read enough that I rarely give up on series anyway. I can certainly understand someone using the subscription to see if a series is worth actually buying, but that doesn't make the subscription worth it given how much more it costs. At best, it would be a benefit worth taking advantage of if you're already paying for the subscription. Either way, I have no problem with someone else thinking that pre-pub is valuable to them. It's just of no value to me, so the fact that I have to pay for a subscription to buy the full versions of JNC's books is annoying. I may look into doing myskaros' suggested workaround to save some money, but from my point of view, JNC has made it unnecessarily annoying to buy books from them. Given JNC's pricing model, if the versions on Kobo were the same as the Premium editions, I would never buy from JNC directly.
Fair enough. I'm the opposite in that I wish other publishers had some kind of try-before-you-buy scheme like JNC. Kindle samples of LNs are sometimes so short that they only include some illustrations and the table of contents. Baen is the only major science fiction publisher I can think of that sometimes sets the price of volume 1 of a series to 0.00 to get you hooked.
With DRM'd ebooks if you don't like a title it's completely wasted money since you can't sell or donate the used book, and I only buy ebooks now for space reasons and to reduce consumption.
