Manga now available for Coins on J-Novel Club!

[myskaros]

As many of you probably already noticed, you can now buy the ebooks for J-Novel Club and Heart manga using Coins! They are priced the same as they are on the usual retailers, 899 coins per ebook, and contain all the same content. Since our manga releases always already included all additional materials that we had, there is no extra premium content in our "premium manga," as it were, but, same as our light novels, once downloaded they are yours to keep with no built-in restrictions on what devices they can be read on!

Unlike light novel downloads, when you download a manga from your JNC library, you'll see this dialog box:

We chose this terminology to make it more intuitive for anyone to understand which version would be best for their personal devices without knowing too much about technical specifications, but we may change this up in the future. As you might imagine, the options go from "lowest quality, lowest file size" to "highest quality, greatest file size." Specifically:

• Mobile: 1400-pixel high images
• Desktop: 2560-pixel high images
• 4K: 3840-pixel high images

As an example, Hero-King Volume 1's three versions come out to the following file sizes:

• Mobile: 83 MB
• Desktop: 265 MB
• 4K: 567 MB

Right now, all the images are single pages; we don't yet have a way to mark 2-page spreads, but we're aware of that deficiency and will be working on adding support for it in the future. We are also considering other file types aside from EPUB, but don't have any details to share yet.

As with light novels, manga volumes in your library give you access to the expired parts for those volumes so that you can read on our website or via the app, and preorders give you access to the streaming chapters even without a subscription!

We know you've all been asking to buy manga directly from us for a long time, so we're happy to finally be able to deliver that to you! Happy reading!

[strangeattractor]

@myskaros

Thank you! I've been hoping for DRM-free manga for a long time.

[MasterLillyclaw]

Me having thought "Finally, I'm all caught up on purchasing the Bookworm LNs, now I can spend my monthly premium credits on purchasing other series over time!"

[samlh]

Huzzah!

Time to pick up my faves - I've missed being able to reread the ones that have finished streaming

[mwbworld]

Sweet. I use a kindle fire (HD 10 7th gen) for my manga reading and I gather amazon's switching to having direct epub support (I've noticed that I can now directly load epubs of the LNs to my kindle paperwhite and that works fine.) So hopefully I'll be able to do the same to my fire tablet (or perhaps when I upgrade the table to a newer one it would work then? Anyone know or have experience doing it yet?

[lilitu93]

@myskaros Great news!

If you’re considering other formats, could you consider CBZ? It’s designed for comics, and I download in that format when I get a chance - Humble Bundle usually sells comics in that format (as well as EPUB and PDF). There are several dedicated readers for it. I currently use Chunky on my iPad, but I know there are other readers out there that support it.

Thanks!

[strangeattractor]

@mwbworld

I have a Kindle Fire tablet. I got it to read epubs by turning on the setting that allows installing a program from the SD card, then downloading Foxy Droid (a version of F Droid, a way to install open source on Android,) to my SD card and opening it.

Once Foxy Droid was installed, I used it to install a program called MuPDF. I use MuPDF to read epub format books and pdfs. It a simple minimalist program that doesn't take a long time to load.

There are other ebook readers available through Foxy Droid as well.

[Angelus]

I suppose I can understand why EPUB was chosen, but from a technical point of view it's a strange format for something that's just images. I prefer my manga as just the image files or a zip of image files, which lets me choose from a variety of (PC-based) readers. But hey, the EPUB is not much more than just a zip of image files anyway so I can convert it with a few clicks.

And joining up two page spreads is pretty trivial (given, of course, that the two halves are pixel-perfect to start with), so in some ways I'm surprised it's not already been done. Except that maybe people using a portrait-format device might not want that as it would halve the height of the image.

[arghc]

Just decided to check today and noticed that the the drm-free mangas are available from JNC. So, now I am in the position of having to buy coins for the first time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no advantage to buying coins in bulk? Did the calculations twice...

[myskaros]

@arghc Correct; the only discount comes from your subscription status, otherwise the cost per coin is consistent regardless of quantity.