Upcoming JNC light novel price increases
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@admin A cap would probably be a reasonably good idea to prevent a whole host of issues, though since coins have a strait valuation of 1 cent per coin which is unlikely to every change (easier to raise the price of the products), the problem of devaluation is unlikely to occur going forward.
A $500 cap is probably fairly reasonable, especially if going forward, sales would be a discount on ebook prices rather than on coin purchases. There's no reason to hold an excessive amount of coins if they aren't going to be put on further discount like credits were.
Once the whole credit to coin issue goes away, holding credit with JNC is no different than people who buy gift cards with retailers. If a retailer raises prices on their items, the gift card itself doesn't lose any value, you simply can't buy as much with it anymore.
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Rather than putting a cap, people should just be more responsible for their money.
People who have excess credits can just either used them up now or get a refund. As the @admin said, unused credit is a liability and not a profit. So people can and will get a refund if they want to since JNC does not consider it as profit for them and still haven't used up your money.
Coins on the other hand have a definite value no matter what happens; 1 cent = 1 coin. No matter what happens to the economy this fact will not change so people can hoard thousand of coins now and their value would not change. The only thing that will change would be the price for the E-Books but that's just how the world works.
A dollar would always be a dollar no matter the time. Only the price for each products changes with time.
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@admin said in Upcoming JNC light novel price increases:
Maybe we should implement some kind of cap to the total number of coins someone can hold in their account. Like 50,000?
I would be against any cap of the amount of coins that can be held in an account unspent. Do what you need to for accounting of unspent credits, but please don't add a cap.
There are some users where it is easier to buy in bulk (budget wise and mentally) then buying individually every time a new volume comes out.
In addition, buying multiple volumes on the site is exceedingly difficult and requires an usually large amount of clicks. There is no way to select multiple volumes and perform one purchase. Each of them has to be purchased separately. A comparable scenario would be if Amazon only did 1-click buy now button instead of shopping cart. This method also has real world adverse consequences. Vudu also only lets you buy movies one item at a time and each purchase shows up as separate transactions. One time for movie night, I went and purchased multiple moves and had to do them as separate transactions and my credit card actually flagged the transactions as suspicious (and started declining the transactions) because of the number of purchases from the site in a short period of time.
If you throw in artificial coin limits to the mix, it adds even more clicks in the process.
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@morbelek if they set the limit to 50,000 coins, that's 71 LN volumes at 699 coins each, or 55 manga volumes at 899 coins each. That's still plenty more than the average person is buying in a single transaction (especially since there's a current 40,000 limit on a single purchase).
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@morbelek A cap would be so that JNC can limit their liabilities. A 50k coin cap ($500 US) is enough to buy 71 LN volumes at 699 or 55 manga volumes at 899 before you're have to top up again.
I don't actually think a cap is necessary if going forward coins will not be discounted beyond what people currently get with membership levels. There would simply be no reason to hoard a huge amount of coins. Credits were different because they dropped the price of buying credits by $1 which gave incentive to buy large quantities if you reasonably believed you would buy that many books from JNC over the course of the next year. But I can understand that from an accounting perspective, JNC may want to institute some way of limiting their exposure on that front.
@BartzBB said in Upcoming JNC light novel price increases:
People who have excess credits can just either used them up now or get a refund. As the @admin said, unused credit is a liability and not a profit. So people can and will get a refund if they want to since JNC does not consider it as profit for them and still haven't used up your money.
That's probably the best thing anyone who has any serious concerns about this can do. Though I don't believe that they'd be required to give refunds, nothing's been posted to indicate they're unwilling to work something out if people reach out to them via email.
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Of course it would be tracked as a liability, because fake currency or gift currency is a debenture (Its a credit system). This is essentially a way of reducing your tax liability in a given year. If that debenture is never called up, then its essentially free money, that is never taxed (depends on local tax laws), because the liability carries over.
Because you put it down as a liability your actual profit showing in your books doesn't increase and therefore you avoid the tax that would come with it. Its just an accounting 'trick' so to speak. [Again, may vary for local tax laws]
There is a difference between a layman's understanding of what profit is, and what an accountants understanding of profit is. But I just mentioned "free money" rather than profit, as that's less specific.
I was suprised by the mention that you were in favour of a cap. Although, I think that only limits the problem rather than solves the underlying issue.
Since, someone asked me about my personal investment into this, for clarity I don't do one of purchases I do bulk buying of book volumes, because if I like a series I will binge read. For example, with Bookworm I read about 12 volumes in the space of 2 weeks, because I was so into the books. For Overlord I caught up from the anime and purchased 4 volumes and have read these in the last week. When I really like a series it becomes an obsession and spend 8+ hours just reading it. If I try and do any other activity I get driven back to reading, because I want to find out what happens.
My expectation when buying a year sub was that by the end of the year I would have had 12 credits, so that I can bulk buy a series, or if I have left overs buy save those for purchasing the series that I'm currently into on here (Lazy Dungeon & Ascendence). [Yeh i do this with Audible and have like 2 years of credits stock piled on there, despite using quite a few]
So, this sort of change potentially directly punishes my spending habits and people like me, if I were to have a Premium Subscription, and would therefore push me to not re-subbing with the same subscription and instead just buying books as and when, because of the risk and hassle of a year sub. It also makes the process a lot less hassle free.
@jpwong
At this point then there shouldn't be any need to sell as "coins", just swap the JNC credit system into a digital wallet like the steam wallet, and make no promises in relation to premium epubs. This would indicate a clear departure that Premium Subscription comes with the benefit of 1 book per month, and therefore not induce people to buy through false information.As a side note the sales media is implicating a 1 book per month policy:
"Premium Members get 699 Coins every month to download a Premium light novel directly from J-Novel Club, plus 699 bonus Coins for signing up!" -
@Tremarl said in Upcoming JNC light novel price increases:
My expectation when buying a year sub was that by the end of the year I would have had 12 credits, s
Do you read prepubs? If not, then perhaps you should drop down to a free membership. If you do, the non-premium sub might fit your needs?
Free - only part 1s of prepubs, buy coins only when you are ready to binge a new series. Coins never "lose value" because you .have 0 coins stored.
Sub - $54 a year, prepubs but no coins, 5% coin discount when you are ready to binge something.
Premium - $120 a year, currently 699 coins per month = 8,388 per year.
Premium offers a big savings when you buy extra coins at 15% off, but if you buy less than 12 books a year the regular sub is cheaper. And if you don't care about prepubs and catch-ups and buy less than 12 the free membership is much cheaper.
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I bought a lot of credits not to game the system but to hedge against the pound falling against the dollar (which it subsequently did).
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