New J-Novel Coins are here!
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I'm usually not a fan of coin systems, since it's so common to have useless balances. Looks like there's been an eye to fixing that here, so thanks for that.
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@animej Same here. What I like here is that the combination of coins not expiring and being able to buy custom amounts makes it feasible to leave the account on zero if need be by getting the exact amount for one book.
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Dare we hope for "Bookworm" Audio?
Though I'm not sure if it'll show up as a video file with text or a read along with time stamps. Either way, I'm optimistic about this.
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So how will Thankgiving/Cyber-Monday sales potentially work? A further discount on buying coins or a sale on the price of the books itself?
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@daytona both are options they could use.
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They could also give a coin bonus on purchase, but I feel like discounting the price of books is more feasible if they don't want to have to do things with the app bundles.
That said, depending on how it goes it will likely impact when people buy coins. A discount on coins means people will load up during the sale and spend them out over the intervening periods between sales basically the same as what they've seen with credits in the past. A discount on books will probably see people move to buying coins as required but see a drop in ebook sales outside of sale periods as people may choose to hold off purchasing books for series they may be following casually and only buy the books from series they are following more closely as soon as they come out.
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@jpwong A third option would be getting a certain amount of coins "back" when you make a purchase that you can use for your next book, like what Bookwalker or even CDJapan do.
Also, well... in order to be able to afford books, I tend to do the second thing you mentioned - buy my priority books at release, and everything else once it's on sale (I keep a tracker for that).
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@eleore Coins back on purchase would probably require new code that's not built in right now. Not that it couldn't be done, but I was more focusing on things that should be possible with what we know is already in place.
The could even do a combination of everything at different times. There's no specific reason why it has to be a black Friday or cyber Monday sale. They could have a coin sale at that time but also do things like offer a slight discount on the series that are on catchup for example.
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@jpwong Hmm, a catch-up discount promotion could be interesting. I remember the survey asked how many series you bought after reading them on catch-up, so there's already some data on interest.
... actually, I think I ended up buying 3 more series after reading them while on catch-up since the survey ahaha.
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This is wonderful news! Now that I don't need to subscribe every time I want to buy a book, I am more likely to buy volumes as they are released.
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Would this mean that we can finally get some of the manga through our accounts? Been hoping that'd become an option for a long while now.
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@mdx Not quite yet, but it's something we're hoping to do!
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@myskaros Thanks! Good to know its at least in the cards
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My 2
centcoinsFirst, I'm glad I can finally get premium, non-drm BEATLESS for here! That's the first thing I check on the coin announcement.
Now, I have to say I'm not such a huge fan of store credit system. Remember MS Points? They eventually decided to get rid of it. To be fair, you are allowed to buy any number of points and 1 points = 1 cent (USD) directly, so it isn't much of a problem. But it's kinda raise the question of why don't just use USD then? Or use both, so someone who does not have coins doesn't have to go through two steps to buy the book.
I guess my conclusion is it's an annoyance but acceptable. Again, finally can get BEATLESS after multiple years wait, so there's that at least
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@hyper Because that would probably raise all sorts of weird issues with their app store bundles in other countries and you absolutely would not want to be mistaken for some sort of currency exchange app.
It would be nice if the site would just offer to buy the necessary coins to get a book if you're lacking, though with a minimum 500 coin purchase I could see how that might end up causing confusion, especially once more non-standard priced titles like manga start coming in which will leave people with potentially all sorts of weird volumes of coins.
Though to be honest, now that manga is (eventually) on the table for DRM free high quality direct downloads, it puts a few things onto my wants list that I wouldn't mind JNC grabbing that I wouldn't have considered pushing for before.
The only real downside for coins vs credits is that coins opens the door to eventual price inflation on titles, though I would imagine most people would have spent whatever they're sitting on right now by the time that happens.
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@hyper said in New J-Novel Coins are here!:
To be fair, you are allowed to buy any number of points and 1 points = 1 cent (USD) directly, so it isn't much of a problem. But it's kinda raise the question of why don't just use USD then?
This is just a guess, but I think it's to minimize the amount that middlemen can skim out of the transaction.
If their credit card payment processor is taking a fixed-amount off of every sale, it would advantage J-Novel Club to encourage people to not buy each book as a separate transaction, and instead buy coins ahead of time. Unclear if this would work out in the current system since the price of coins would never change - however, if they did sales on coins with even the tiniest of discounts, they could drive larger transactions that way. (I suspect that the Cyber Monday discounts on credits that we used to have may have been initially motivated something like this, but my likely-inaccurate understanding is that fixed-per-transaction costs are normally only charged to very small merchants, so J-Novel Club has likely outgrown the need for such things entirely.)
Similarly, if app-store owners like Google or Apple take a 30% cut off the top of purchases made through apps (which they do), then it advantages J-Novel Club to do monetary transactions outside the app. However, customers want to be able to unlock books through the app, so a "pay now, pick out the books later" system addresses both concerns, at the expense of a little bit of pain.
Lastly, some users (like me) prefer it this way. Credit card transactions are clumsy and slow, bounce the user around to a bunch of different websites, and security minded users are likely on high-alert during the whole process because financial information is at stake. Going through a credit card checkout every single time I want a new book would be exhausting. I'd rather buy my coins up front once a year (so that I can take my time and make sure nothing fishy is going on and all the payment processor pages are who they say they are), and they get my books in one-click after that.
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Fixed price fees on credit actually do get charged to larger businesses, which is why a place tends to lose money on the sale if you're buying less than a dollar on credit. Just larger chain stores can absorb that as a cost of doing business through the margin they make on the bigger transactions (digital only businesses may be different than brick and mortar stores though).
If we do have a sale similar to the previous credit sales, I do intend to load up on a single transaction rather than doing multiple small transactions, so I'm hoping we do get some more information about how any potential sale will end up working (or if they're simply no longer going to do sales at all) so that I can plan for how to handle things once my existing credits/coins clears out.
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Stripe is 2.9% + 30ยข per successful transaction. So yes, it's better if you buy in bigger amounts, and that's the main reason that limit is in place.
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Wow I didn't expect to get all these very thoughtful replies with good points all around. Thanks folks.
I understand the reason for lower limit per transaction. It's just that I feel it'll be more transparent to just say it outright with actual currency--no fee for >6 USD (or whatever currency) etc. Otherwise a small fee added, or no small purchase at all. It'll look bad but that's more honest IMO. Again, I will say what they decided on isn't bad so I wouldn't complain too much.
Now, on the sale topic. My speculation is that there will no longer be any extra sale for coins on top of premium/member discount. Instead, we will have subsets of books/series on sale in rotation. In other words, there will be no way to buy cheaper coins, but occasionally we can buy books will less coins. If that is true, I'll be disappointed to be honest. In the old system I can (and happily) buy a whole lot of credits on sale and can be confident that I'll get the best deal for any future books I want on release. Now I will have to wait for sale if I want the best deal, which will make me be more reluctant to get the books day one. I hope I'm wrong.
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@hyper said in New J-Novel Coins are here!:
I understand the reason for lower limit per transaction. It's just that I feel it'll be more transparent to just say it outright with actual currency--no fee for >6 USD (or whatever currency) etc. Otherwise a small fee added, or no small purchase at all. It'll look bad but that's more honest IMO. Again, I will say what they decided on isn't bad so I wouldn't complain too much.
The issue there is that the price is different based on if you're a non-member, a member (5% off) or a premium member (15% off) because you can buy coins and then just sit on them and let your membership lapse if for example you're just following a few series and plan to access the pre-pubs by simply pre-ordering the volumes rather than via membership. Some people did this while we were on the credits system, so there's no reason to believe they won't continue to see people follow series in this fashion in the future.
Seeing as how they're already giving a price differential between membership tiers, a coin sale wouldn't be off the table, but it does open up options to other types of sales. I think JNC is aware that if they change how sales work it's going to change buying habits and we've discussed it a bit up-thread. All that's left to see is what actually happens.
