Newbie question: Even with premium subscription, your only option is to purchase each volume?
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As a premium subscriber, I thought one of the benefits would be to get access to all the chapters of the books available via J-novel club. I've been using the app on my iPad to read some of the titles and I realized with Vol. 2 of "The Magic in this Other World is Too Far Behind!" that only chapters 1 & 2 were available to read through the app and I had to purchase the eBook of volume 2 to read it in its entirety.
I also started reading "How a realist hero reformed a kingdom" with the J-Club app and realized the first 2 chapters of Vol. 1 were available and only the 1st chapters of subsequent volumes were available as previews.
This is greatly misrepresented in the premium membership description as it indicated that as a member, you would get to "read the latest volumes as they are translated!" and "Weekly releases of ~40 pages a week per series". And as Premium member, it said you would get these benefits of membership PLUS a monthly credit for 1 eBook a month. But I'm not seeing the point of the premium (or frankly the regular paid membership) if not all the chapters are available and in fact, are only available if you purchase the whole volume.
Is there something I'm missing or is this how the membership benefits are intended? If its the case of latter, the description of in the membership benefits are outright misleading.
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@nahanoy Hello, yes that is the way the membership works it is used to allow users to read the "latest" book that is currently being translated, once the eBook has been released all the parts sans the preview part are put into the vault.
As per the FAQ page:
The pre-pub releases are available until the e-book gets published, just like the name says.
After the final part in a volume is released, there will be a few weeks where we will do final proofreading and typesetting for the e-book, so all parts will be available at the minimum 2-3 weeks, with ~8 weeks for the first parts in each volume.&
Once a volume has been published as an e-book, it is no longer available for pre-pub reading.
Please support the author by purchasing the official e-book!
Or you can sign up for a Premium membership and use your premium credit to download the premium eBook straight from our site!It is important to note that JNC does offer new catch-up titles every month, this month you can read all of Mixed Bathing in Another World & My Big Sister Lives in a Fantasy World. A "Catch-up" is just as it sounds it is for new members to catch-up on series that have been put in the vault. There are also many other series that are still on their first volume or even their second with all parts available like the recent Anime Expo Announcements.
For future reference you can even look at the expiring volumes topic, to see what is on its way into the vault.
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@nahanoy said in Newbie question: Even with premium subscription, your only option is to purchase each volume?:
"read the latest volumes as they are translated!" and "Weekly releases of ~40 pages a week per series"
Unfortunately, it is your misunderstanding. The latest volume of "The Magic etc." is 6, the latest volume of Realist Hero is 7. Each week, these series are indeed updated with about 40 pages.
If you are not already caught up on a series, membership gives you access to the entire library only when that series is on catchup. On the front page, you can see what this month's series are: currently for August, Mixed Bathing in Another Dimension and My Big Sister Lives in a Fantasy World. Unfortunately, you just missed July's series, which included all 6 full volumes of Realist Hero :(
If you would like to cancel your membership and request a refund, email support@j-novel.club and they will be happy to assist you. In cases like these, when you've just signed up and didn't realize what you were or were not getting, they usually refund with no issues.
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J-Novel Club's system is indeed confusing, but there isn't really any easy way to explain it all.
This Reddit post is my best shot at trying to explain the differences between the different tiers:
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Yea, it’s a shame you missed last month’s catch-up titles. Both Realist Hero and Grimgar were available to read from the very beginning the entire month of July. This month they’ve moved onto Mixed Bathing and Big Sister Fanstasy World.
Edit: It should also be mentioned that pre-pubs don’t contain color illustrations, or premium bonus content (like short stories). https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/305/premium-e-book-bonus-contents-list?page=1 -
@nahanoy It's not misleading, but it is very literal. You get to read the weekly releases of the latest books as they are being translated. That's a true statement. The latest volume being translated is available for reading from when the first part is posted until about 2-3 weeks after the entire volume is translated. After that, only the first part is available.
A Premium membership, delivers one main benefit: a $1 discount on the price of credits for purchasing volumes from the site. I don't count the free credit because the difference in price between a regular and premium membership is equal to the cost of a credit at the discounted rate.
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If I'm gonna read a series anyway I'd much rather have premium to get cheap creditse to buy the premium versions of the books which can contain bonus stories and/or other extras.
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Thanks all for the clarification! Not sure I will keep the premium membership but it's very helpful to have my misunderstanding straightened out.
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If you read a lot, then getting a buck off per volume adds up pretty fast. Things like catch-up series or pre-pub reading wind up being icing on the cake.
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@animej Case in point. I bought 9 credits today. That saved me almost the entire cost of my monthly membership fee. If you buy books, Premium is the only way to go.
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If it's a choice between regular and premium membership, you don't even need to buy all that many books for it to make more economic sense. Look at it on an annual basis:
Regular membership: $54 per year
Premium membership: $120 per year or $48 plus twelve books per yearIf you take the premium discount into account, the breakeven point is 10 books per year. If you buy 10 books per year, regular membership costs $124 (54 + 10*7), and premium costs $120 (plus you still have two credits left over).
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That's kind of my point. I bought around seventy prem credits my first year and haven't slowed down yet. With premium, that's $70 saved.
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It's quite ingenious, I came here looking to purchase the premium ebooks directly, and due to the subscription, I've ended up sticking around and buying a lot more.
I would have said that directly selling the ebooks would have been more effective... But obviously not!
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@fozzedout And people scoffed at me.
No but seriously the "restrictions" I have put in place are very much to attempt to change people's market behavior to something that grows light novels in general as a reading market.
I don't want people to buy more books, exactly, what I want is people to be given more incentive to buy more books more often.
