Purchasing Premium Credits with Free Account
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We were having a discussion about the new ability to purchase Premium Credits over on /r/lightnovels and someone pointed out that they couldn't purchase them with a free account. Is this true? If so, why would you limit this to only paid subscribers? A lot of people have no interest in paying for a subscription for the prepubs and would prefer waiting to buy the completed and edited published volumes. Why would you prevent them from purchasing the high-quality DRM free EPUBs?
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@japzone I'd like to keep the premium content a perk for subscribers. If you're a free account holder you can always buy the normal ebooks from Amazon or Kobo or iBooks.
This keeps the "premium" part a little more exclusive. I originally thought about making it possible but at a high price point like $10 per credit, but thought that sounded a little too punitive.
I guess I'd like to incentivize people to actually subscribe so they read more of our content! If you're paying for a subscription you'll hopefully check out more books than you would if you had to pay for each one, and that means you'll discover content you wouldn't otherwise.
If DRM free is really such an issue for you, I'm sure that you could grab the epub from Kobo (the images are the same quality there as premium actually) and find a way to get rid of it...
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@Sam-Pinansky That's pretty disappointing considering the only reason I'm a member is cause I got it for free. I personally don't like reading parts of volumes as I much prefer reading by the volume instead. So locking the "exclusive content" to paying subscribers is kind of a turn-off since I don't find the big "membership" perk to be very luring.
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@Aruseus493 In that case you can just subscribe for a month when the volumes you want are out and subscribe again later to repeat. Think of it as paying a bit extra for the bonuses here (though if you're only interested in 1 series it's not really worth it I guess), otherwise go with Kobo for equally high resolution images. I do think J-Novel should open it up to everyone as I imagine it's more beneficial to them to have people buy directly from here.
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@Paulo27 Yeah, I wouldn't personally mind if they charged one more dollar or something for non subscribers.
But I understand it being used to encourage subsctiptions too or be a perk for being a subscriber as well.
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@Terrence I actually thought this was the original plan (that I read here somewhere), it'd be X base price and then -Y% for normal members and -Z% for premium members.
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@Aruseus493 Honestly, it does make business sense for this restriction to be in place.
When I saw the post on /r/lightnovels, I ran some calculations and ended up with the absurd 44 volumes / 12 month period in order for Premium Members to under-cut to total price of that many "Premium" volumes if non-subscribed users could purchase them at the member's price.
(As a side note, I need to check the USD cost of the regular releases for some better context.)Compared to the more reasonable 9+ volumes / 12 month period required to make a Premium Membership cheaper than regular membership + manual credit purchases, the numbers just point to this implementation of the credit purchasing system.
Put into the context of the frequency of full EBook releases for one series, it makes the Premium membership better than the regular one if you prefer reading the partial releases AND retaining the finished releases of 2+ series.
I won't comment on whether it is reasonable for premium exclusive content to exist, but to me it feels catered towards the dedicated LN readers since the online retail versions still contain the full novel's text content.
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@Technizor I understand why it would make sense from a business standpoint, but as a hardcore reader of Light Novels that only reads by the volume, I just kind of find it unfair that I would be expected to pay a subscription for the ability to buy the versions with extra content.
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As a premium member I don't see a problem with selling credits to non-members. Maybe at a price premium over Amazon/etc. I still /hope/ I would get a discount as a subscriber.
Considering that you don't have to split the income for native sales it seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.
