Some questions on premium membership and JNC in general
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Hello all,
While I am figuring out a way to pay as Paypal isn't available I want to ask some questions I wasn't able to find an answer.
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Bought some volumes from JNC on Amazon (3 of Realist Hero, 6 of Invaders of Rokujouma,...), is it possible to transfer/upgrade these to the premium ebooks? Or would I have to buy these once again to access premium content if available?
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Are pre-pubs and catch-up titles in some way available to download? I usually read on my tablet which only supports wi-fi so reading on the go needs downloaded books/chapters.
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With premium costing 10$ a month and a credit costing 6$ the rest essentially is for reading pre-pubs, catch-up titles and the forum access?
As I haven't read most of the series available from JNC so far the pre-pubs aren't really useful for me now, so I am thinking of going for 1 month and buying credits to get some series up and after that go for a full membership to also make use of pre-pubs. This leads to two more questions:
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Heard you can buy between 1 and 10 premium credits. Is 10 a hard limit per transaction, per month or of some other kind?
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Is there anything I missed you get for a full premium membership someone new to JNC novels can make use of?
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I would like to change from Amazon JNC novels to directly buying them here mostly because of offering more direct support and the premium content like side stories, but I am interested in the picture quality a lot of people keep on praising too. How big is the difference really between JNC and Amazon bought novels? Not in terms of resolution but actual quality? Are there any comparison pictures somewhere?
I hope you all can help me with some of these questions which may help me decide between starting with a single month and going for a full membership, most importantly question 2 I guess.
Greetings and thanks in advance, Fantasylord
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1 As of right now there is no way to upgrade/change the books you bought
2 There is no way to download pre-pubs at this time
3 That is correct, you also get a premium members badge for this forum
4 There is no limit to buying additional credits in a month, just 10 max at 1 time you can buy another 10 right after you buy 1 set.
5 I don't think you missed anything.
6 if someone doesn't post comparison pics i will after work, the difference is startling
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Here's what I know:
- No, it is not possible to transfer the ebooks and update them to premium ones. You'd have to re-buy them. If I remember right, Sam mentioned something about licensing/royalty issues related to the process.
- The official app does not allow "offline reading" as far as I know, not sure about the 3rd party apps around. But they most likely don't either.
- Basically yes, you get access to the forum and are able to read the new parts of each LN volume currently being translated published weekly. And each month 2 different series are on catchup so you can read them from the start.
- I believe the limit is only per-transaction. Meaning you can buy 10 credits, and right after buy another 10. But I have not tried myself so I can't really say I'm 100% sure.
- I guess is also depends on what you are expecting from the membership, rather than missing something. For example something that comes up from time to time is that peoples think they can read ALL parts of ALL series by just paying the monthly fee, while you can only read the parts of the current volume being translated. Previous volumes usually expire 1 month after the ebook is published, and are not available anymore unless the series is on catchup. But I believe you've already understood this.
- I haven't bought any JNC novel on Amazon so I can't really comment on this. But I know for a fact that you shouldn't base the comparison on Amazon's preview. They compress the images really badly for the preview compared to the actual ebook you can purchase. That said, I still prefer to buy the premium ebooks here since I get bonus content and in the end it costs less for me (because of a good conversion rate from my currency).
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EDIT: seems @Rahul-Balaggan was faster :p
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Most of your questions have been answered by previous responses. I can only add this:
On the JNC app you can preload a single part and keep reading even without an internet connection. Unfortunately, you'd have to reconnect to get the nest part. Otherwise, on browser, you could open the parts on multiple tabs.
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One thing to add - you get one free credit on the 15th of each month - so if you deduct the cost of a $6 book, the premium membership really costs you $4 a month
sorry, didn't read #3 correctly, I'm tired, forgive me. -
Okay still at work but got a second to take screenshots
All are from Grimgar V1 the fight scene in Damuro
From Kindle:
From BookWalker
From Premium Edition
Also 1 other thing you may or may not be aware of regarding premium editions. You already know they come with DRM free downloads and High resolution images, they also come with Premiuk content with varies from bonus images, interviews with the author, special in-depth stranslator notes, to Bonus short stories, etc.
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@fantasylord said in Some questions on premium membership and JNC in general:
- How big is the difference really between JNC and Amazon bought novels? Not in terms of but actual quality? Are there any comparison pictures somewhere?
Images from JNC epubs are usually about 2000 pixels high, saved as .jpg without chroma subsampling with pretty low compression (about same as libjpeg's "97%", apparently photoshop can't do more), at that level it wouldn't be easy to find any artifacts even with side-by side comparison.
^Ao Oni picture, losslessly cropped with jpegtran. No blocking, no ringing near letter borders, no chroma-related artefacts. Naturally, prepubs' images aren't that good - around 860x1200 with moderate compression.
How much it's compressed on third party platforms doesn't seem to be easy to answer - they may be using different levels of compression on bigger images (like a 6MB 3800x1200 image in Faraway Paladin) or try to resize them. Word is, Amazon even sends you different versions depending on target device. From the couple of volumes I checked it seems pretty safe to assume that file size listed on amazon page is the about same as size of premium epubs, so if you can find out how big your copy is on your device you can estimate how the much images were compressed (assume that non-image data is about 400Kb).@terabyte said in Some questions on premium membership and JNC in general:
The official app does not allow "offline reading" as far as I know, not sure about the 3rd party apps around. But they most likely don't either.
Mine actually did from the start but I never advertised it because I'm too lazy to fully figure some things out.
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The image quality on Amazon seems to vary greatly depending on the device you download it to. On a paperwhite, you get a pretty small file with noticeable compression, but on an iPad I assume it sends the full size, and images actually look pretty good.
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@blueshift as far as I recall it is even downsized for the ipad. The biggest pictures should be for the Voyage or Oasis. Atleast ir I recall correctly the setting in calibre.
