[IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025
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@niq said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
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.
When I first started reading at JNC, that was true for me.
It hasn’t been true for me for a long, long time.
Basically, I try to read the first few prepub parts of every series that comes out - the only ones I haven’t were when the series blurb made it very obvious that it was Not My Thing. So I can’t remember the last time there was a series on catchup that I hadn’t read enough of to decide if I liked it - and if I did like it, I’d kept up with it in prepub and didn’t have anything to catchup on.
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@Gamen said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
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.
Here is my opinion on coins and credits: they both are an attempt to get our money first. For subscribers, they function as value-added to the service. For non-subscribers like me, they allowed us to put our money first in exchange for the discount (BF sales, etc.). The difference is that with credits, it is a promise that 1 credit = 1 book. I think that's fair trade--I gave them money first in exchange for discount, and they promised that each credit will be worth one book, old or new, when I decide to spend it.
I spoke on the topic a lot already, so I'll try to be brief, but with coins, they certainly removed the promise that 1 credit (= XXX coins) = 1 book. That's bad, but fine for new books--inflation and what's not. What is unacceptable for me is they also raise it for old books. It devalues the money I gave them (for coin buyers) and devalues the old sub tier (for subscribers). That, for me, is a breach of trust and certainly anti-consumer. It would still be barely acceptable if they gave plenty of advance notice. That wasn't the case, and at this point I must say that was by design.
For coin expiration, is that bookwalker? I think only coins you get as cashback expire. I'm fairly sure there are laws against expiration of digital currency bought with real money everywhere. And in any case, it's not very assuring that both JNC and BookWalker are owned by the same company.
