Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?
-
So in the stream that just happened for subscription update it was mentioned that with the introduction of the readers membership stuff the monthly catch-ups would be going away and, whilst it's a bit of a shame, I understand why and don't really have a problem with it. That said I was wondering if we could still get something like a monthly set of recommendations instead?
There are a lot of different series on J-Novel club and for me the monthly catch-up was a great way to discover new series that I had never known existed before so I was wondering if we could still do the same thing just with a set of recommendations instead?
So instead of a post and page on the site with the 4-6 catch-up titles for the month we could instead have a monthly post and page on the site of 4-6 recommendations of series to look at instead? Preferably with a mix of both Manga & Light Novels (like catch-up was) and series that are in the readers club and those that aren't.
-
blink
...
Goes to watch the stream
So, the new subscription options:
Tldr: I just lost $50 a year ☹️The Premium Reader's Club forum tags had better be the coolest looking things ever...
Anyway, back to the actual point of the topic! Yeah, monthly suggestions would be nice. The downside of the larger library is it doesn't really help you with finding what you might like.
At the very least, I'm sure we'll work up a Reader's Reader's Club Recommendations thread so we can recommend stuff to each other (I promise some of my recommendations will be for series that don't star an Apothecary!).
...But only some.
-
@kuali said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
Tldr: I just lost $50 a year ☹️The Premium Reader's Club forum tags had better be the coolest looking things ever...
I don't really follow, how can you lose money?
My biggest issue with the library idea (and I have the same issue with the rentals) is that JNC does a bad job of keeping the online parts fully edited. If it were possible to borrow properly formatted fully edited books, I'd find that option a lot more attractive.
-
I'm at work and can't watch the video. Does anyone know when these changes actually take place? I'm assuming October but would love to know.
-
@Nubz_Unite 3rd of October (that is, Friday next week).
@unknownmat said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
I don't really follow, how can you lose money?
That's the price difference between my current subscription ($120/year), and the one I'll be switching to ($170/year).
-
@kuali said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
That's the price difference between my current subscription ($120/year), and the one I'll be switching to ($170/year).
Ah ok. So, in other words, you plan to opt for the highest tier of service regardless, and doing so will become $50 more expensive, now.
I'm not really sure if I plan to make the leap. I mostly pay for my subscription by inertia and my desire to continue supporting AOAB (and a few other series to a lesser extent). I also like JNC the most among the light novel translation houses (I like how relatively transparent they are, access to authors and editors, ease and effectiveness of submitting corrections, DRM free e-books, etc).
That said, my library sits at (checks) 492 books, and I've been a premium subscriber for about six years now. I feel like I've probably given JNC enough. It's a good time to reassess. Alternatively, given my book buying habit, that 15% discount might pay for itself. I dunno. I'm still ambivalent, I guess.
-
Monthly catch-up has been crap for me lately, but I have also dropped or failed to pick up some series thinking I could catch up later. The Duke's Tutor was one example, though even then I failed to read it when it was on catch-up recently. So I think I will miss the catch-up mechanic, however I don't quite understand the reader membership. Is it like Kindle but only for completed volumes? Or completed or discontinued series?
-
@Kurzaa said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
I don't quite understand the reader membership. Is it like Kindle but only for completed volumes? Or completed or discontinued series?
As I understand it what it'll do is give you access to specified pre-pub chapters of various titles, based upon which Japanese publishers play ball and to what extent.
Primarily limited to those works that are "complete" in Japan? Maybe tied to the TL also being complete?
Although they specifically mentioned Altina as being one, so "complete" can mean "Not sure when/if the next volume is coming out?"So not the fully QA'd version unless they can free up staff to port the published versions into the pre-pub database.
Not the extras that are part of the published books; the color illustrations, any extras that only show up in the published works. None of those will be there.
But all of what would show up when a title was on catch up. -
@Kurzaa said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
So I think I will miss the catch-up mechanic, however I don't quite understand the reader membership. Is it like Kindle but only for completed volumes? Or completed or discontinued series?
Yeah, it's seeming to be a bit like the Kindle Unlimited subscription, I believe Sam made mention along those lines during the stream. It is something I've seen people requesting over the years, and he's called the catchup series a bit of a stopgap measure until they could actually implement that. Focusing on "complete" series (ones where JNC has translated every volume that exists in Japan, so some hiatus series like Altina the Sword Princess will be there among them), but also some ongoing ones which will have a few volumes available to read. It won't be the "full" volume though, as it'll just me the prepub streams like catchup made available though.
-
@unknownmat How good the value is for everything depends a lot on how much you use each reading option (library, pre-pubs, purchases).
I ran the numbers for an even use of each reading method available to every subscription. I doubt anyone reads quite that evenly, but its a decent ballpark figure for roughly how much you need to read for each membership level to make sense financially. And it works out to:
Reader's Membership overtakes no membership at ~12 books read a year (6 purchased / 6 library).
Club Membership needs ~14 books read a year.
Reader's Club Membership needs ~17 books read a year.
The Old Premium Subscription pays for itself at ~16 books a year. (It seems slightly better value than its replacement - saving $12/year at low reading counts, dropping to $1.20/year at high reading counts.)
Premium Club Membership is also ~17 books a year.
Premium Reader's Club Membership needs ~22 books a year.The Premium Reader's Club Membership becomes the cheapest option of all when your annual reading hits the high 30s, incidentally.
Personally, I still buy enough books each year to use up all my free coins and then some, and there's still a good few series I read solely on pre-pubs, so a membership is still worth my money, but as to which one... Well, Premium Club and Premium Reader's Club both seem tempting, depending on how much use I actually get from the library. So I'll give Premium Reader's a year and see how it goes.
-
@kuali honestly I'm quite iffy on the readers library atm since we have no idea how many and what types of books are going in it. Good for you for doing that math though Jesus lol.
-
Uhm...it's true that while I used it a lot at the beginning of my subscription, now I rarely read series on catchup because I'm up to date with most things I'm interested in, and for series I missed there are often too many volumes to read in a month when you also factor prepubs. A library of novels to read with less strict expiration times might be more useful to the current me, but I have to wait and see how it works in detail and what will be made available. Arifureta would be a good start, even if I'm up to date with it.
The annoying part is that if I understood things correctly to getvthe equivalent of my current subscription I'll have to pay $90 instead of 54 in the future. -
I love the idea of monthly recommendations. With a library as large as Sam indicated, highlighting a few series would be a great way to find new reads. Like “this series is getting an anime next month check out the first volumes” or looking for a new romance, try this
-
@kuali Wow, thanks for putting this together.
I don't quite follow though. Let's look at the highest tier. According to your chart, you can read up to 36 books / year before it costs you more than the subscription alone. But how do you get to 36? You get 799 coins/month, so that's 12 books / year. If you assume a 50/50 split, I understand how you can reach 24 books read / year for the annual subscription price.
The more you assume readers will take advantage of the library, the better value you get at every library tier. But I'm not interested in the prepubs until JNC cleans them up, so I'm in the worst value category of reading very few (if any) books from the library directly. So for me, as a straight per-book value proposition, I'd get 12 books / year for the subscription price plus $6.79 for each subsequent book purchase (coin discount). I don't think I read enough books in a year to make up for the $170 subscription fee. That said, there are also intangibles like forum access, access to on-going translations (the "pre" in pre-pub), and supporting JNC's vision... Those are worth something to me.
EDIT: Some quick calculations puts the break-even point for the highest-tier subscription at around 74 books purchased / year.
-
@unknownmat Basically, I split the books you read evenly between books you purchase, books you read the pre-pubs for but don't buy, and books you read from the library but don't buy (or however many of those options were available for the subscription in question).
So the highest tier's 36-book price (which gives access to all three) includes 12 purchased books (all free because of the included coins), 12 books only read as pre-pubs, and 12 books read from the library. But Premium Club (which doesn't include Library access) had 18 purchased books (12 of them free) and 18 pre-pub only books in its 36-book estimate.
I actually did run the all-purchase numbers, too, before doing the even split ones - if you buy every book you read, Premium Club and Old Premium both pay themselves off in the 50s, but you won't come out ahead on Premium Readers' Club until your 74th book of the year. (Reader's and Club will never be worth it no matter how much you buy, and while Reader's Club would eventually catch up, it would need well over 100 books to do so.) So yes, not using pre-pubs or the library really can hurt the subscriptions' cost effectiveness!
The Purchase Books Only version of the table
-
@kuali said in Can we still get something like monthly recommendations once monthly catchup is gone?:
Basically, I split the books you read evenly between books you purchase, books you read the pre-pubs for but don't buy, and books you read from the library but don't buy (or however many of those options were available for the subscription in question).
Ah, got it. Maybe I'm weird, but every pre-pub I follow are books that I intend to buy, so there are zero pre-pubs that are not also purchases for me. That's why I was struggling to understand your chart. To me, the real value of the pre-pubs is the early access because I'm just that impatient.
EDIT: Incidentally, your chart helped me to realize that my current subscription is the best option for me (maybe I'll grab another big allotment of coins while the 15% discount still applies). I think I'll just ride it out until it expires and then make a decision on how to continue.
-
I'm kinda hoping we get recommendations from the catalog as I consume my other streaming services that way too. I usually don't know what I want to watch on Netflix so I usually pick what looks good from the various recommendation lists and watch that. I do that now on the catch-ups on here if I want to try something new.
Like on Netflix, I'm not dedicated enough to watch everything before it leaves the streaming queue every quarter for cost efficiency, but having it available to watch when I have free time is enough of a break even for me.
While stuff is more expensive, it's not as bad as I thought it would be.
At least we missed the worst case scenario. We don't have to worry about reading a new prepub part in Tearmoon Empire and reading a scene about Mia washing her hair then immediately seeing an AD on the next page from Sam asking if we want our hair as fresh as Mia's and that we should buy Reviv3 shampoo and conditioner (with associated monetized link) for use on us and our horse.
I would probably lose my mind at that point and cancel everything.
-
While new reader club is a nice option, still disappointed with the loss of catch-up because new reader club won’t actually let you “catch up” to ongoing series. I was hoping to bridge the gap with physical Tearmoon volumes and prepub once catch-up came back around again. (I fell off after the first few volumes, decided to give it another shot after forum comments about how it was still going strong and the anime, and bought physical for resale potential.)
Now that Bookworm is over (minus HY5/fanbooks/manga), and most of my favorites are caught up with the Japanese and so publishing less frequently, I may consider dropping membership and just buy volumes as they come out. I don’t have as much free time as I used to anyway, and I’ve been thinking of shifting what reading time I do have back more towards non-light novel stuff. Need to consider what I really want to keep following and would pay for without the membership and run numbers for likely publishing rate and physical vs digital…
For series that don’t run forever, readers club does mean there will be at least the theoretical possibility of coming back to my second-tier series at some later point and binging them when they’re complete if I regret dropping membership, without having to wait for a specific catch-up month.
-
Ok so I’m a premium member (and have been forever) and the price has not gone up in years, now it is going up by $12/year (less than 10%) and there are at least 3x the number of pre-pubs streaming vs when I first signed up. I see that it is a bummer that catchups are going away, they were not “free” to J-Novel club, they were a marketing expense, and if not enough new members signed up because of using catchups (or sales of. Books from the marketing activity) yea, change gears and try something else. I imagine the pay for editing and translation has gone up more than 10% in the past 5 years so the increase seems reasonable to me.
-
A lot of people mention watching "the subscription stream". What is that? I can't find a link that mentions that anywhere on the j-novel.club main website, and if it's something that appeared in a message, I didn't see it.
It's interesting that so much is being discussed, though... it would be helpful to know WHAT is being discussed.
Is there a link, please?
