[IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025
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@kuali
Then the solution is even simplerKeep the credit system, and have a cash in account as separate from the credit system. Why they won't do this and why they opted for a "Premium currency" is very clearly to drive sales and profits as they want to incentivize people to stock pile the premium currency. As people are much more likely to buy a premium currency in bulk with a discount, than they are to simply add a credit facility. Its a predatory practice, that has no real reason to exist beyond milking a customer base. Premium currencies are traditionally the preserve of scummy games, and yet here we are using them in a quite literal book shop.
Its misleading. I and many others are now short several features of the subscription that they originally paid for.
And if you want premium books or manga its even easier, have a normal check out page, and the credit act as a coupon redeeming for the equal value of a standard e-pub. Ta-da done, now you have the 1 book 1 credit system, and for more premium items it applies a discount value to whatever they want to set it at.
If you want a discount on purchasing books for certain membership then just add it as a standard store discount.
Multiple other online outlets manage to do all of this no problem.
But anyway, apart from my frustration I doubt anything will actually change, and we won't see anything for probably a years time after JNC does a financial review, and the water has settled to see the effects on the active subscriptions they have and whether its been profitable for them to rug pull their customer base.
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@AnimeMayhem
I agree with your conclusion that they are maintaining their silence on purpose. It’s actually why I made the post. I wanted to leave my feedback that this course is going to cost them at least one subscriber. Not a huge deal for them I'm sure, but I’d rather put it out there on the small chance it changes something.On the point that we shouldn’t expect better, I vehemently disagree. Customer service and customer communications should not necessarily be the translators’ job, but they need to be someone’s job in a company.
As a small business owner that had to raise my own rates just this year, you’d better believe my company gave months’ of notice prior to the transition. And if a customer has a complaint, someone is guaranteed to be fielding it in some way, and promptly at that, even if it’s just to say they’re consulting management. If JNC doesn’t have staff with this skill then they need to hire some with their increased revenue from this price increase.
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Two weeks have passed. Last week panel has come and go. Still no response and no attempt to make up for their (self-admitted) lack of communication in any way. Any trust I still have left is gone.
@jpwong said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
but I guess from a discussion standpoint, would people have preferred that JNC kept the existing released volumes at the $6.99 price point back then but in exchange all new volumes would have been priced at $8.99/$9.99?
Yes. If that is the price for new books, charge it accordingly. I'll decide for myself if I still want to buy them. Why use old books to subsidize the new books, or vice versa?
And I highly doubt the math even works out. I don't believe increasing the price of the old volumes can make up for lower prices of the new releases going forward. I admit I have no clue about the actual data, but I am fairly sure the sales are front-heavy, like most entertainment products. The number of post-initial sales won't be able to cover the lost revenue from lower price on the early sales.
There is another reason to keep the old books at low price--to use them as "advertisement" for new releases. Same reason they heavily discount the first volume--to entice people to pick up the series.
The lack of advance notice is still the worst thing about this update, but retroactively raising the price of the old books is my close second (I don't use subscriptions, so I don't comment there). They destroyed a lot of consumer trust with seemingly minimum benefits for themselves.
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ok - I'm not calling anyone out specifically:
- because I'm trying not to be a jerk
- because I believe there are widely held misunderstandings, not just by a few folks who voiced opinions on these fora (and I am not immune)
Point 1
699 or 799 coins (and whatever actual money paid for that) doesn't equate to the actual cost (or a actual cost and a particular markup % ) of an ebook at any one time, for a particular transaction - that transaction is NOT FUNGIBLE FOR ANY OTHER purchase of an ebook past or future from JNC (from the POV of what it is "is worth'/ intrinsic value etc)
JNC currently 'sells' almost all their ebooks for 799 coins or about $8.00 US:
- they don't have the same page count
- they didn't all cost the same to license
- the royalties due are not likely to be the same
- the cost of translating/editing each book(labor etc.) wasn't the same
and where does the money go? (speculation , but educated guesses on my part):
- a cut goes to royalties, to the original author/publisher
- some goes to pay for sunk costs in translation/editing for that specific work
- some goes for overhead of JNC as a whole - the website, general overhead/ rent/utilities , staff, marketing, attending cons, etc.
- some goes to fund finding new works to translate
- some goes to corporate overlords; Kadokawa
if any is left, that would be profit- and because many of the previous costs are not incremental per unit- JNC has to sell "x" quantity of a title to break even and "x+1" for that title to make any money at all. The profit margin may increase over time - but the cost of 'production' never goes away (and is subject to inflation)
to make sales of a product profitable overall, It is always a juggling act of lowering selling price to try and increase volume or IF THAT DOESN"T WORK increasing selling price per unit - as a company you still need to cover your expenses one way or the other
Point 2
I am not a lawyer, and I did not scrutinize the terms and conditions of the Terms of Service of the with enough vigor to make a legal argument (and laws will vary by national jurisdiction anyways) but when I look at what the 'agreement" was - you pay for membership: you get pre-pubs, an allotment of coins, access to the fora (and dependent on level) some discount on purchasing more coins...terms subject to change at JNC's discretion (the language is in there ) they never promised access to catchups, and they are honoring discounts on coins for ongoing subscriptions---but they don't have to
also, they are not legally required to tell us about changes: it would be a good business /relationship practice, but I am sure they retained whatever legal resources needed to cover themselves - I don't like it, I think they make members unhappy but not being more transparent - but talk of 'legal obligation' is fruitless
Point 3
JNC has always been tight lipped about ongoing negotiations, business plans that are in the works, upcoming release dates, etc. I don't like how they handled this communication, but it maps. This was a big deal, licensing back catalog af manga to Sony/Crunchyroll for a new service, launching a new service on JNC, 'tweaking' membership levels and pricing - who knows when details were finalized what last minute changes needed to be made? worse would've been to put out communication of changes that turned out NOT to come to pass (that either members wanted, or that scared members) or to have details wrong. Ideally I would've liked for everything to have been fully baked and announced around Sept 1st, with a plan for folks to upgrade/modify that offered some kind of incentive to do so and also included some kind of messaging around the 'why's and wherefores' of the changes ("we're increasing pay to out valued translators" ) but it is what it is
JNC still has a chance to correct the misstep, I suspect they are waiting to see not only what communication is in the fora, but what folks actually do; will members embrace the changes? leave en masse? will the crunchyroll deal bear fruit?
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From a legal perspective this is wrong.
- They are legally obligated to give suitable notice of a variation of contract.
- If terms are not agreed then a refund must be provided, to the value outstanding, as you cannot unilaterally vary a contract without agreement. [This is what they are currently honouring on people's request it appears]
- Silence cannot be used as implied consent, however conduct can be sufficient to show agreement to a variation of contract. Continuing to use the service for a period of time would be sufficient conduct.
- Everything you get whether its "free" or a "Perk" as part of a purchase is part of the overall consideration. How it is labelled is not necessarily relevant to whether its included within the purchase or not. They are all treated the same.
This applies to all Common law nations. So the commonwealth, and America. And similar terms also apply to most Civil Law Nations (Europe), with specific consumer and contract regulations bolting on this for added protection for consumers.
The T&C can say what it likes about variation without notice, it wouldn't hold up in court.
However also from a legal perspective no one brings these sort of claims because there is no value to it. You only get class actions as lawfair in America because of the punitive rewards provided for, and for individuals it would be a nonsense to even pursue as the costs would outweigh any gain.
On a note about profitability. Afaik JNC is operated under M12 LLC which is part of the Kadokawa group and you can find further information on https://group.kadokawa.co.jp/global/company/group.html
There appears to be financial reports available online through Yahoo, but the Yahoo service appears to be restricted for EEA. So I cannot access it.Announcement of the change to M12 LLC
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2025-03-10/bookwalker-global-service-changes-ownership-on-march-31/.222162You can find the group Kadokawa financials on their website. At end of this month you will see a disclosure in English for the FE ending 2025.
The 2023-2024 are currently live and in that report they show a significant drop in international sales.
https://group.kadokawa.co.jp/global/ir/integratedreport/
For the segment as a whole net sales were up 1.4% and operating profit down 21.3% attributed in part due to investment for the mid-long term.
Anyway, if you look at the 2024 report, they want by 2027 to have 340 billion yen in sales. 70 billion of that being international. They're at 260 billion in 2024 march. They sat at 200 billion for 5 years between 2015 and 2020 and then had hard core growth in 2022 and 2023, and it looks like they really want to hard push this. So expect generally massive investment and growth in Japanese IP generally in the international market for the next few years. Although whether thats on this platform or one of the many others they own is anyone's guess.
Becuase of this appears that their cashflow went into the shitter. from 30 billion in the black to 65 billion in the red, but in 2025 its 44 billion back in the black. In the 2025 report also sales is now up to 280 billion. So they have 2 years to perform larger growth than they've achieved in the last 5 years on average.Which on that note I'm predicting in 2026 November a price increase to 899 coins and manga to 999 coins. Also a rapid expansion in the reader library to attempt to buy a customer base/market share. You can see the drive on this as operating profit went down this year also. In the JP 2025 report. There is mention explicitly of expanding the e-book and publication business due to not having to deal with excessive price competition of physical books as well as the cost of returns of unsold product,
Edit: Completely offtopic, but someone explain to me why there's a J-novel nina French TL of Classroom of the Elite, but JNC doesn't have an English version?? :(
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@Tremarl
you make excellent pointsin your 'legal perspective comment' you seem mainly to responding to my point#2
(which is fine) and if I understand you correctly , what you are saying is: if JNC does change the terms of what is included in a membership / contract (without adequate notice) they are required to 'give an out': allow folks to cancel without penalty, offer pro-rated refunds etc - yes they have a liability. I fail to see how that liability would exceed to cost of membership (and as far as I can tell we agree that they did offer refunds) - so they did the calculus, decided that the liability of offering refunds outweighed to cost (whatever they were) of letting the cat out of the bag early and made a business decision - so if I amend my point - They don't have to tell us anything about changes, but they do have to let us quit and refund our unused portion of our membership - I didn't think the latter point was in questionI'm sure that the business decision was colored by the contract they signed with sony and the launch of the readers' library offer - JNC couldn't very well continue to offer catchups when a new paid offering is there
I would like JNC make good on making those of us with annual memberships 'whole' for the remainder of our annual membership (an extra 100 coins, so that monthly allowance = 1 ebook) since this wouldn't cost JNC much, and would 'buy' a lot of good will - but I have no illusions that they are legally obligated to do so.
regarding the points about Kadokawa's profitability: I suspected as much, hence my snarky comments about JNC's corporate overlords, and my disappointment that the price hike isn't going to pay increases for translators, but to corporate's bottom line (which is what I'll believe until I learn otherwise)
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@Tremarl said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
Edit: Completely offtopic, but someone explain to me why there's a J-novel nina French TL of Classroom of the Elite, but JNC doesn't have an English version?? :(
because Seven Seas bought the rights before JNC did for English ebook rights (or JNC didn't have the cash on hand in 2017 and chose to spend on other series or any other number of business decisions- and AFAIK Seven Seas doesn't publish in French)
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@Tremarl said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
Keep the credit system, and have a cash in account as separate from the credit system. Why they won't do this and why they opted for a "Premium currency" is very clearly to drive sales and profits as they want to incentivize people to stock pile the premium currency
The reason they went to a coin system is because we have a whack of stuff that isn't standard priced. Beatless wasn't available on the site previously because it has a $9.99 base price. No manga was available before because it has a base price of $8.99. The credit system worked great against this type of inflation, but it also would mean that something like a third or more of their catalogue wouldn't be available on their own site which would be a weird direction to take their sales considering how heavily they've been moving into trying to get both the manga and LNs for series as of late.
I'd be interested in hearing what people think about buying manga directly through JNC. The content is identical to what's available on all the other storefronts (ie no special JNC exclusive content like with LNs), but JNC does offer for download manga epubs with image resolution far greater than anything offered on those other storefronts.
@hyper said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
And I highly doubt the math even works out. I don't believe increasing the price of the old volumes can make up for lower prices of the new releases going forward. I admit I have no clue about the actual data, but I am fairly sure the sales are front-heavy, like most entertainment products. The number of post-initial sales won't be able to cover the lost revenue from lower price on the early sales.
They actually shared in the Q&A back then that enough sales come from their back catalogue vs buying newly released novels to make the across the board pricing work. Obviously we only have their word for it, but they do have enough series and volumes that I could see volumes that have been out for 6 months or whatever counts as "back" probably does make up a sizable portion of sales. While we can't tell if this worked out for them, the price increase has been in effect for 3 years now, and they haven't needed to make further adjustments.
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@jpwong said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
The reason they went to a coin system is because we have a whack of stuff that isn't standard priced
there's also some stuff that goes on 'sale' almost every month - moving to coins allowed JNC to change prices quickly - (up and down) and got around global exchange rates (stabilized ebook prices - 799 coins is 799 coins in the USA or Australia or wherever) I also suspect there are some credit card transactional hoops that you don't have to jump through when selling memberships and tokens (coins) vs media(where rules may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction)
but yea - I suspected 'back in the day' when they moved to coins...it was to allow for price creep
I read banned books
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I couldn’t care less about the pricing change, everything costs more welcome to 2025.
Taking away the catchup without fixing the ancient relic that is the search feature on this website is a travesty though. New/old and alphabetical as the only options make me wonder what century this site is running in. It’s 2025, introduce genres, tagging, and possibly external site integration for some reviews.
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@Jon-Mitchell Oh for sure, the fact that coins were introduced on exactly the same announcement that the original price increase occurred pretty much signalled to everyone that the price of LNs on JNC's own site were slatted to go up sometime. The two main things I was surprised about really were that it took this long, and the revelation that they were actually making less revenue per sale on their own site due to the reduced price compared to other platforms considering those platforms have to take their own cut.
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@Thehalfwit said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
I couldn’t care less about the pricing change, everything costs more welcome to 2025.
Taking away the catchup without fixing the ancient relic that is the search feature on this website is a travesty though. New/old and alphabetical as the only options make me wonder what century this site is running in. It’s 2025, introduce genres, tagging, and possibly external site integration for some reviews.
Tags are the only thing searchable Quite disappointing actually. We used to have search on the other fields also.
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@sorvani well I guess you learn something new everyday. Wish that was obvious, it’s nice to see that they also have the - function if there’s a tag you don’t want.
So I take part of that back. They just need to unify the tags, since some are redundant, and they could definitely use a tag list and definition page. Some are obvious, others are less so, and some seem to be unique to one series and make me question the point of the current system. What good is a tag that’s used literally once?
The series finder still kinda sucks.
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@Thehalfwit I also se that some series have an age rating (12+) but we can't sort by that either
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@jpwong As I already mentioned, if its not within the normal pricing range the credit can be used as a coupon to apply a proportional discount. This would functional exactly the same as it does in many other websites.
From a consumer perspective it'd function as it does now, but it'd also let them change the base pricing without screwing over their Premium members.
But that would preclude them from predatory practices in the future. Functionally why do we have it as a premium currency if they're treating literally as a dollar value. Its to abstract it from real currency. There is no logical reason they can provide why we buy coins instead of account credit when the transaction is literally 1 coin = 1 cent.
I don't care if they price creep, the issue is that they've done it in a way that fucks over their existing customer base. They could have decided to give members on a subscription 799 coins till the end of their subscription, but they decided not to. Why? They could have decided to give Premium Members and normal Members subscription to the Readers club to make up for the lack of catch up for the remainder of their subscription period, but they chose not to. Why? They could have kept the discounts until the end of the membership period, but decided not to Why?
All of these decisions fundamentally are anti-consumer. They took an agreement that people have pre-paid for, and then slashed the vast majority of those benefits with 0 notice. And its pretty obvious why they chose to repeatedly not give notice to people, because they were hoping that people wouldn't notice.
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@Thehalfwit The tag system is something that's on the radar for a complete overhaul... eventually. I think the main issue is lack of IT resources to actually get all the web site backend changes they want to get done. It's why the first major overhaul of the site took so long originally.
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I should not have held the coins from the last year 😥. Ah well, Bookworm is done so I can cancel.
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@Jon-Mitchell said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
your fears of SONY buying Kadokawa are justified
Just FYI since people may have forgotten what happened earlier this year, but Sony did increase their share of Kadokawa to 10% in January, making them Kadokawa's largest shareholder.
@Tremarl said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
Why they won't do this and why they opted for a "Premium currency" is very clearly to drive sales and profits as they want to incentivize people to stock pile the premium currency. As people are much more likely to buy a premium currency in bulk with a discount, than they are to simply add a credit facility. Its a predatory practice, that has no real reason to exist beyond milking a customer base. Premium currencies are traditionally the preserve of scummy games, and yet here we are using them in a quite literal book shop.
I mean, people were stockpiling credits before too. People were bulk-buying 100 credits on the Black Friday sales or something like that? My memory is fuzzy. Switching to coins on JNC's part was basically about being able to change prices. They didn't change anything else about it; you can still subscribe for a single month and stockpile coins, yes?
Also, coins support the rental system.... which I forget even exists.
Actually, on other (book!) stores I have "coins" on, they expire after a year! And they're not even purchased at a discount or anything. That's a bit worse than prices simply going up.
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No one is going to sue because even if all of the members here came together, that's still not nearly enough money to face Kadokawa on an even level, and even in the hypothetical scenario where you sue and win, it's not like you can force them back to the old business model. At most, you'd get them to upgrade you to the corresponding new tier (Reader's Club for previous regular members and Premium Readers Club for previous premium members) and only for the current term of your subscription (i.e. until the next time it's renewed). In the very best case scenario, i.e. you pay annually and your subscription just renewed, it'd be worth ~$40. If you pay monthly then it's worth $3. Even if everyone here donated that amount to the cause (which is improbable because then you have nothing to gain even if you win), you probably still wouldn't have enough money to cover the expenses of a full trial. Anyway a lawsuit won't happen unless there's someone here with a few extra millions in their pockets who decides to sue just for some sense of justice.
Sorry for writing two topics at once but I think it'd be better than writing two posts one after the other.
I think that the even if the Reader's Library was included in the membership without paying extra, it's not nearly as valuable as the catchups used to be.
I mean, it's nice that you can read whole series beginning to end without having to buy or rent each book and without a time limit, but so far I haven't seen any series in the library that really caught my eye. Most of the series there are pretty short to begin with (around 6 volumes on average) and most I haven't even heard of before. In the first place, there aren't too many notable series in JNC that are already complete. I think the only notable one is Bookworm, and I seriously doubt they'd ever include that one.
And the ones that are just the first three volumes? That's like game demos on Steam; they're meant to get you to buy the rest of the books. I think that giving them to all members without extra charge would've been a better business model.
The real charm about catchups was that you could use the opportunity to get into a series you haven't read before and if you indeed caught up to the latest volume before the end of the month you could just continue following the prepubs - and that's completely gone now.
