Improving the website's user friendliness
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One thing I would suggest is including the pre-publish for free with a pre-order, and not requiring a subscription for that if someone pre-orders the final version.
Oh, and the naming of the parts in Ascendance of a Bookworm is confusing at first glance due to the title already having "Part" in the name. Maybe instead of "Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 2 Volume 2 Part 7", make it "Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 2 - Volume 2 [Part 7 of pre-publish]".
Or maybe replace "part" in the pre-publish with a synonym for it like "piece".
Also, your website needs a bit of work to make it easier to navigate. It's functional, but you kind of need to know what you're looking for. To start with, bookmarking series (within the site) and a view history would help A LOT with navigation. Unless I bookmark it directly on my device, I have to search it to get back to that series' page, which is tedious.
And anywhere you have a title to one of your novels, it should be clickable to take you straight to it so you don't need to go type the title into the search bar. And speaking of the search bar, that should be accessible on every page so that it's easier to find.
And it's not immediately obvious from the website except in the account page how the membership and "premium" membership functions, and I actually first thought that this was a website just listing information about the novels like MyAnimeList. It wasn't until someone pointed out to me that this is indeed a place to buy and read the books that I realized that, even though I stumbled upon the website through Google searching for where to get the official translation.
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I agree the site (and the app) need a bunch of improvement. And there has to be a better way to explain what JNC is than having to read the FAQs
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If you mean allowing free members to buy premium epubs, this is intentionally reserved for paying members since the premium epubs have exclusive bonus content (that are even harder to obtain in the Japanese, since one would have to buy each book several times in order to get different store-exclusive short stories), they are DRM free downloads that could be abused (although supposedly they already are), and Sam (the founder) has mentioned that he doesn't want to appear to be a competitor to the bookstores he is partnered with.
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@legitpancake DRM for executables is sometimes effective. But DRM for pure data is almost always broken. And there only needs to be one person to break the DRM. That unfortunately seems to be a lesson all too many executives fail to learn. So with DRM, the honest customers get a product that's inferior to what the pirates get. Frankly, I avoid DRM protected products because when you look at, the subtext the company is saying is "we're clueless, and we don't trust our customers." And honestly, who in their right mind would do business with a company with that attitude?
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@legitpancake said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
If you mean allowing free members to buy premium epubs, this is intentionally reserved for paying members since the premium epubs have exclusive bonus content (that are even harder to obtain in the Japanese, since one would have to buy each book several times in order to get different store-exclusive short stories), they are DRM free downloads that could be abused (although supposedly they already are), and Sam (the founder) has mentioned that he doesn't want to appear to be a competitor to the bookstores he is partnered with.
Wow - I did not know that the Japanese version is so crazy that you would have to buy multiple books to "catch them all". Reminds me of some comics with cover variants which are already a craziness itself.
The premium ebooks you can get here are DRM free, but they still have a note of the buyer within each book imprinted.
@GoldenSun3DS A lot of suggestion I concur with. I have shared my thoughts as a member here: https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/2831/newbie-s-opinion-of-the-membership-december-2019
Hoping that it could be of use for the people I like to support - unfortunately I often got the feeling that the community is rather content/settled with how things are with priorities set on quick releases as long as the community stuff is not broken.
@jcochran said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
@legitpancake DRM for executables is sometimes effective. But DRM for pure data is almost always broken. And there only needs to be one person to break the DRM. That unfortunately seems to be a lesson all too many executives fail to learn. So with DRM, the honest customers get a product that's inferior to what the pirates get. Frankly, I avoid DRM protected products because when you look at, the subtext the company is saying is "we're clueless, and we don't trust our customers." And honestly, who in their right mind would do business with a company with that attitude?
I would welcome a discussion about DRM in a separate topic. I already noticed that most forums members have a preferable "white hat" attitude. I personally can say from my personal experience since the very beginning of the internet, that DRM or copyright protection measures in general is one of the short sightest and worst thing which could ever happen to the internet. Too often I miss demos for stuff nowadays and a lot of anti-DRM arguments have turned out right with people benefiting savings in marketing and still buying licenses/items of what they truly appreciate. But that is stuff for a different topic.
Sorry for my bad English - it is not my native language
As a new member I am sharing my opinion of the membership
Inactive 22.01.20 until I resubscribe -
@serah said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
The premium ebooks you can get here are DRM free, but they still have a note of the buyer within each book imprinted.
I'm not sure why, but a lot of them don't have that now it seems. All the "older" series seem to have the "Premium Ebook For [Username]" on the copyright page, but a lot of the newer ones seem to be missing that line. I'm not sure if been unintentionally omitted from most of the newer ebooks or if it's an issue with the process they use to generate the books when you click the download link, but it's gone from being in practically every ebook, to almost none of them (or at least the series I've been buying) over the last year or so.
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@jpwong It's still happening, but not very often. I would say 1 in 10 probably have it of the ones that I have bought in the last year.
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That is strange.
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@timmaaah said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
@jpwong It's still happening, but not very often. I would say 1 in 10 probably have it of the ones that I have bought in the last year.
I guess they just sometimes forget to add it to the source file.
Stay shiny, y'all.
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@shiny said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
@timmaaah said in Improving the website's user friendliness:
@jpwong It's still happening, but not very often. I would say 1 in 10 probably have it of the ones that I have bought in the last year.
I guess they just sometimes forget to add it to the source file.
I... do not want to imagine that, but... it might be possible seeing the other things which seem forgotten...
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I found this site convoluted and confusing to get to the point where I can actually read the content. Then when you manage to get the content it displays on a small little window in the middle of my screen. There is really no excuse for such a poor user experience on website these days. I will just wait to buy the novels when they come out for kindle on Amazon.
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@andrew-engelhard I recommend using this extension if you're using chrome
Unlike when you try to zoom directly from the browser, this will get the job done right!
