[IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025
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@AnimeMayhem I am not sure what you mean by that.
From how I see it the coin system entirely exists only for the adaption of the premium subscription.
Back then it used to be the 1 month of subscription gets you 1 credit to redeem 1 ebook.
The obvious monetary issue with that is us subscribers being able to save up those credits and therefore redeem them for future releases. Taking inflation and price increases into consideration JNC virtually lose on money. Just virtually since the money was spent effectively either way with the subscription.
Countering that by introducing the coin system only decreases the virtual loss and allows easier changes to the subscription system, like it just happened recently.
With every ebook bought from JNC you basically get a digital file created on the spot with some line of texts embedded as a pseudo DRM, but the ebooks are DRM free aside of those few lines of text. There is no guarantee that any of the ebooks come with bonus contents as JNC has mentioned before they can not always negotiate successfully to get them all - back then before Kadokawa.
Long story short: in theory if it is just about selling stuff, JNC has no need for the coin system and they could react even better with the pricing without it. The whole necessity for that is just the "1 ebook included per month of subscription" which then changed into coins.
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@Serah said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
@AnimeMayhem I am not sure what you mean by that.
From how I see it the coin system entirely exists only for the adaption of the premium subscription.
Back then it used to be the 1 month of subscription gets you 1 credit to redeem 1 ebook.
Not entirely correct, unless I'm misremembering there was also the condition that you could not buy credits unless you were a subscribed member (with the premium tier getting a discounted rate). I suppose this doesn't necessarily change whether they'd need to have a virtual currency but it was part of the ecosystem.
Another thing to note about virtual currency is it probably makes the store implementation a lot easier, since it keeps interactions with payment processors in one corner of the site. It also bypasses the need to implement a shopping cart which is apparently so hard that even some much larger companies seem incapable of it.
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@Tremarl said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
Also gift cards are different as you have mentioned in the sense you can buy the products without the gift card, so consumers are not forced into buying "premium currency", they have the option. I think that would play a decent factor to show that Wallmart has acted reasonably in the provision of the gift card services. Compared to what JNC has done.
Honestly I don't think it would be that great a distinction. JNC does not force you to hold onto coins, you could choose to buy exactly enough for whatever you specifically want to purchase and make that purchase immediately. And it's not like JNC changed the value of coins, the cost of coins still remains exactly the same as before and for all products that aren't what we refer to as standard priced LNs, their cost remains identical. While I will acknowledge there is room for legal arguments in all of this, what's ultimately happened is JNC adjusted their prices to match the MSRP they've given to everyone else, so I really don't feel like arguments related to this particular issue would go very far.
The main differences compared to when they announced the revised MSRP for their products in 2022 is in the timing and the forum post announcing the change. There the original announcement was made at the Anime Expo panel (Jul 1), however it was limited to in person attendance only. The forum post was made Jul 13. The newsletter email went out Jul 14 and the changes went live the first week of August. There was a banner announcement regarding the coin change (not the price change) on the site at some time in July as well.
When you compare that to what happened this time, the announcement was made on livestream available to anyone online Sep 26, the newsletter also went out on the 26th, the change went into effect Oct 3. The forum post was put up after the changes went into effect, and no banner was used on the site to indicate to anyone not following their discord/youtube about the pending change.
Honestly I'm really wondering what drove the need to go this quickly. When they announced the change in price on every platform but their own, site users essentially got 3 weeks notice (with people who follow discord closely managed to get a month notice). When they did it to their own site, users who only browse their site/forum basically got no notice, while people who follow the discord/youtube got 1 week notice. And while I believe anyone who was aware of the original price increase anticipated JNC would eventually raise the price on their own site to match, it just seems to have to gone unnecessarily fast (especially when you consider the phone app still hasn't been updated and we're almost at 3 weeks post go live). This does lend credence to the theory posted earlier in the discussion that orders came down from above more suddenly than staff had planned for. If this did come from above, I hope it was simply in response to data related to the fact that JNC was making less money per sale on their own web site than competing ebook platforms rather than a signal that the parent company intends to become far more hands on in terms of operations.
@afdsfafa said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
It also bypasses the need to implement a shopping cart
I think that's really the main reason we have this system beyond reasons for what's given out as part of the premium tier. As far as I've been led to believe, JNC's developer coded out the entire purchase and payment system for their site, so it's not like we're just using some prebuilt backend that had all that stuff already (like how for example animate international's site is just sitting on top of shopify). Given it sounds like most of the site was essentially coded from scratch, it makes sense that they'd go with the system easiest to develop over having a bunch of fancy features that would take away time from getting important backend things updated.
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What I was trying to get at is the JNC website doesn't sell books, it sells coins. So my question is if they had just a normal store that sold digital books, wouldn't they have to allow other retailers to sell the same versions as opposed to only JNC being able to sell "special editions" as it were?
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@jpwong said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
Can you imagine how much worse amazon would be if you were limited to one item per checkout?
Unless it's changed since I switched from Kindle to Kobo, Kindle doesn't have a cart system and hoo-boy did I get fraud alerts about all the small purchases.
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@AnimeMayhem Likely those bonuses were negotiated specifically for JNC only and they are not permitted to sell those editions on other platforms.
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@jpwong JNC 100% forces you to hold onto coins. If you get 699 on sub and save you have 1398, you use it to buy manga at 899, you now have 499 coins left. Minimum purchase of coins is 500. You wanna now buy a book you need to buy 500 coins, for a 699 book, now you have 300 coins left.
This is one of the big complaints about premium currencies, is that they are priced in such a way to force the collection of dust.
@AnimeMayhem From a legal perspective whether they sell with coins or dollars the rules surrounding how it operates its store are the same. I'm not aware of any regulation or laws that would force JNC to market books from other publishers.
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coins vs credits :
it seems to me that having a virtual currency and 1 layer of separation between the financial transaction and the merchandise transaction solves a bunch of potential business problems- you have fewer SKUs tied to credit card transactions, simplifying that process, and since as a business you pay fees (to Stripe or whoever processes) this adds up
- you are less subject to the whims of currency valuation fluctuation (you outsource the risk to Stripe) transact in dollars or euros or pounds
- having e-books priced in coins, means you can more quickly put things on 'sale', create rental portals (and raise prices) and potentially offer more products that coins could be used for
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I don't deal too much with payment processing systems, but I would have thought you'd have an individual SKU for every book, because each one has to be catalogued separately for licensing fees and correct bookkeeping.
The fee is normally % of the transaction, so the total fee would be the same if it was several individual purchases or one large purchase, unless there is some sort of minimum fee they're running into.
The mechanism for putting things on sale wouldn't be functionally different between having it priced in coins or dollars.
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@Tremarl There are subscription tiers that don't give you coins, you have options if you do not want to maintain a coin balance. The sole downside of the lower tiers is the lower purchase discount which is only really allowing you to purchase books at a below MSRP rate.
@Tremarl said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
The fee is normally % of the transaction, so the total fee would be the same if it was several individual purchases or one large purchase, unless there is some sort of minimum fee they're running into.
Actually the fee is typically a % of the transaction plus a set amount. So I think the typical merchant agreement for Visa for example is $0.95 plus 1% of the purchase price per transaction. This is why many small businesses say not credit cards for purchases under $5 even if that's technically not allowed under their merchant agreement with the credit card.
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@Tremarl While margin squeezing is a form of predatory pricing that doesn't seem to be happening here. An accepted example is a vertically integrated auto company controls the metal manufacturing, makes cars, and sells them to customers. They would raise prices on the metals and the manufacturing of cars against other businesses and the vertical company would then sell to its customers at a lower cost than other business could afford to sell to their customers. As J-Novel is actually raising prices ($6.99 -> $7.99) on its end customers that is actually an argument against price squeezing.
@jpwong @AnimeMayhem Unfortunately having the coin system should be more profitable than accepting cash alone so I can see why they switched it them. If you thought of the coin system as the same as the gift card system, it makes more sense. Some of the perks of gift cards from the business standpoint is:
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people deposit money with the business ahead of time so it can be used later. One person purchasing a gift card doesn't amount to much, but scaled up over thousands or millions? That is a significant amount of money. While true from an accounting perspective the money is a liability to the business because the money hasn't been "spent" yet. They are gaining interest from those funds and their business is more liquid because of the cash infusion.
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people spend more money. Like I often encounter at J-Novel if you don't have enough coins to buy a novel or manga, you will spend more money to get the coins you need to make the purchase.
I mean look at airline miles, credit card companies and other retailer regularly give the equivalent of millions in interest free loans to airlines when they purchase miles in bulk so they can give it to their customers. And those miles get truly devalued frequently.
The only thing that baffles me is that a big part of gift cards is building brand loyalty and customer acquisition. I can walk into a grocery store and buy an Amazon gift card for a friend who is going to college to help defray their moving costs. Amazon gets potentially gets a new customer and money and my payoff is I was able to help my friend. Win/Win. But J-Novel isn't doing that. I can't seem to buy a gift card (regular gift card or using the coin system) to give to my friend so I can introduce him to various light novel series. And since light novel series like Lazy Dungeon Master don't have a physical copy, I can't loan him my copy like you would normally do with books.
For a lot of the stuff they are doing it is like that are almost there, but aren't going to reach it which makes everything from the customer side more vexing. (Cannot bulk purchase books/manga via carts like Amazon or other retailer; No real search ability or recommendation system for the Readers Library like Netflix or Paramount; No ability to buy or gift subscriptions to non-members like many business chains like Target, Walmart, Disney, etc.)
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@morbelek I never said this was a case of price squeezing, just that there are multiple types of predatory pricing.
In regards to JNC the predatory practice from my point of view is the usage of a premium currency and all that entails. I think a better comparison rather than gift cards is in-app purchases through game currency. That is how they are marketing it and how it appears to be sold, and the content is not otherwise purchasable without buying the premium currency.
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@AnimeMayhem said in [IMPORTANT UPDATE] New Subscription Tiers + Readers Library Now Live as of October 3, 2025:
What I was trying to get at is the JNC website doesn't sell books, it sells coins. So my question is if they had just a normal store that sold digital books, wouldn't they have to allow other retailers to sell the same versions as opposed to only JNC being able to sell "special editions" as it were?
Considering the terminology and legal details, you might be on point.
