News Qidian's Announcement

And that has to with what exactly?

It's different content. WW wouldn't offer anything that's behind the paywall. Ergo, it's not a free "alternative". It's not an alternate source to get the same content.

 

The content may be different but new readers wouldn't know the difference. How would someone new to the scene know the difference between Er Gen and Tang Jia San Shao? To them, one offers free reading service while the other charges for it. Granted, certain people would still subscribe to the "paywall", but most people wouldn't. It's like the difference between a f2p mmo and a p2p mmo.

 

This is why QI offers the first 50 to 200 chapters for free.

And even without that, having free sites works to their advantage. Given that regardless of any circumstance, QI should have a larger library to offer. New readers would be introduced to the genre on the free sites and then eventually go over to the pay site for more content once they exhausted the free stuff.

Be it a subscription or a per chapter fee, a sizable amount of people would pay.

There would be no reason for them to squash WW, assuming that WW played ball with them.

 

Haaa.. you talk like your plan is the absolute best for readers, like you are listening to us 'readers'. And please tell me, how many ten of years will that take? I may be dead by the time you start Real translation. God I'm gonna throw my phone across the wall after I type this.

 

@ongoingwhy you are the one who misunderstood everything.

By law there is only an agreement between Apple and app developers. You can't say Apple policy affect everyone because it's a lie. It only affect app developers using in their apps tip services which are used by people mentioned by you.

Apple policy > developers > users of apps.

Your misunderstanding of my words is from one simple thing - I have been talking about how things are by law. There IS correlation between people you mentioned and Apple policy but Apple policy doesn't affect them by law because users are not side in agreement between Apple and app developers.

To be honest looking from the side we both are right - I'm saying it from law point of view you are saying it from hmmm every day normal guy point of view.

Suming it up - Apple policy affect directly only app developers and affect users indirectly.


@rdawv "I mean, there are readers who are calling for bans and boycotts... does that mean they will stop reading the novels... for ever? I doubt it." - you know there are thousands of chinese novels to which Qidian doesn't have any rights - authors working for other companies etc? It's not like chinese novels = Qidian novels or nothing. It's Qidian novels OR other Chinese novels which are still the same genre just not written by authors working for Qidian. Quality of such novels is the same as those written by authors working by Qidian - so we as readers doesn't lose anything at all.

As for dropping novels we are already reading - is it anything new in our community? How many times translators have been dropping good titles? If this time we would drop few novels just to make a statement so be it. It's not like those who drop those few titles will die or cry. There are milions of good books in the world and you would never read them all (I'm not even mentioning those which are being created as I write).

In the end it's Qidian who need readers, not readers who need Qidian. I can easily switch to other novels straight away because I simply support translators and our community - I believe in them and know they would pick up good novels for us. By the way - there have been already announcement at wuxiaworld regarding new novels coming in - if translators will need to drop all Qidian novels I'm 100% sure they would get good novels from other publishers. So in the end do we as a readers lose anything?

 

Exactly, that's why I am comparing Apple's recent action to Qidian's. Qidian is taking legal action against WXW which is pissing off WXW supporters. Apple is taking legal action against Chinese app developers which is pissing off their users. Bear with me here, I am not saying they're exactly the same. I am saying that the end results is the same. They've both angered the community.

 

It's sad for WW to be besmirched like this. This Monkey King had nothing to add since all my fellow readers had added their thought that parallels with my own. As such, @rwxwuxiaworld I bid good luck in winning this battle

As for @Qidian , This Monkey King would humbly ask for you to screw off, piss off , fuck off or any words that have the same meaning or equivalent of the aforementioned words. Thank You.


P/S : JUST GO TO THE WALL AND REFLECT QIDIAN! BETTER YET, GO DIE

 

This isn't the issue I had in mind. Yes, people drop novels all the time, one reason being the lack of translators. What I meant was that Qidian stands to lose out the most because of their crappy approach to the community.

Your remark of "In the end it's Qidian who need readers, not readers who need Qidian" is exactly my sentiment. Qidian's suppression of fan-translations will simply drive those readers to drop those novels or even to resort to aggregator sites to continue reading.

Is Qidian even aware of such sites? Perhaps they should train their guns that way, before trying to bully actual fans translators.

 

@ongoingwhy I know what you mean don't worry

@rdawv "Qidian's suppression of fan-translations will simply drive those readers to drop those novels or even to resort to aggregator sites to continue reading. Is Qidian even aware of such sites? Perhaps they should train their guns that way, before trying to bully actual fans translators." As a business owner myself I have been dealing with chinese CEOs in the past and most of them when having status quo in China are thinking others are no big deal. They are trying using their power in order to get their way solely because it's have been working in their own country. For me it seems Qidian doesn't have any legit western PR officer and they simply don't know how to operate on international market when they are dealing with such a thing as a worldwide spread community. Even the way they are writing is pure business-like.

I'm 100% positive they know about such sites (well China doesn't care about copyrights of anyone in the world - there have been something like 12 or more "Harry Potter" books ). In any market involving goods with can be copied or downloaded piracy is normal thing - so it's just corrateral damages for Qidian.

The main problem Qidian have is thinking they are big shot on international market when in reality as for now they are even worse than some no-name company. Having good untranslated novels doesn't mean our community and translators will submit - that's what they are thinking. They are trying every single thing which you can find in chinese book regarding business relations with potential customers/employees. Stick & carrot > trying to paint yourself as a good guy > saying good thing (as per rule "nice word towards them won't cost us anything") > sending scapegoat (usually low tier employee/employees) to deal with mess (if it won't work you can always claim it's this employee fault - usually after it doesn't work there is an official statement from higher tiered representative of company regarding this matter within three working days). > what will be next is offering a lot better deals for high skilled translators (simply because they are in urgent need of them) especially if Qidian representative have been reading @etvolare post and saw quote "I would love to work with Qidian." - this alone is enough for them to try to make their offer better in the eyes of the best translators.

To be honest unless Qidian will employ western PR officer with good knowledge regarding this community they would keep doing mistakes time after time. They are thinking about situation now as a simple setback - nothing else. There is many ways which can fix their PR and repair their reputation to certain extent but the main point is - they don't know them simply because of their lack of knowledge and differences between our cultures.

What will comes next we will see - now I'm awaiting next official announcement from Qidian simply because I want to see if I'm right regarding their stance. By the way - from my point of view it seems their announcements are written by someone in Chinese and then translated to English thus they just sounds odd. What they should aim for is dialogue with community.

PS Seems like I need to get used to write smaller posts

 

I'm not sure if I should laugh or be angry.
But this is utter bullshit.

 

You mean laugh or cry

 

It's not something I could cry about and my tears reached its quota with Ichiya (Fairy Tail) and H.R. Wells (The Flash, TV series) becoming sacrificial lions this week.

 

This picture was pages ago, but it's cool so quote.
Also, excuse me, but I read all thirty-two pages and still somehow have no idea what's going on. QI damage control->Flaming->Some debate about the legal stuff->Fighting...

Eh, can we just settle with, let's let the Ancestors duke it out and hide in a bunker?

 

you have eyes but cannot see mt tai

go back to china and do not cross the boundary

 

I don't support Qidian, but if they do offer the first 50-200 chapters (depending on the novel) free of charge to everyone and anyone, or maybe even the first 20 and continue to do so... I do feel like that is fair enough for a paywall site and enough to know if you'll generally enjoy the work or not and make an informed decision on getting the rest of the novel. But I will not accept a subscription-based business model where you have to dig into your wallet to even test it out, which is what a lot of websites with a lot of written material do. There's a lot of news websites where you have to shell out a subscription if you want to read an article that turns out to be misleading, inappropriately biased, or outright false. I hate that.

If you HAVE to give money even if something is really terrible and you had no way of knowing beforehand besides word-of-mouth or something, that's the biggest push-away. Plus, they never do refunds for that kind of thing.

Unfortunately, I don't know where you got this information about QI's pay model and I don't know for certain if it's true or not, and if it will remain true in the future. I don't mean any offense by that, just that I want to be careful in dealing with this company. (I also don't really touch QI's website, so if what you said are very basic facts, then I'm sorry for being totally unaware of them.)

Admittedly, this whole debacle wouldn't be as big a problem if Qidian were a reputable company with consistently ethical and fair business practices, and we could trust them for a fair deal for the readers and translators. But their reputation even in China seems to be in tatters; they exploit an ever-hungry monopoly and they are owned by a notoriously greedy parent company, Tencent. In fact, if they were a trustworthy and ethical company, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.

Plus, they had to drag this all out into the open, attack the claim on the 20 original licensed novels, etc. They rescinded that latter bit, but the damage has been done. There's no reason to trust or listen to what they say, or to expect them to stick to it going forward. They'll do whatever they can get away with, and there's no reason to expect them not to do everything they can to maximize profit. That includes screwing over free sites if they want to and feel as if they can get away with it. They obviously have no qualms about enforcing their monopoly.

 

Here come the bullyes.....


Just Go Die


HAhhaha

 

The reason why the Chinese website of Qidian offers 50-200 chapters before charging is simple: basically any amateur writer who thinks he has a talent in writing webnovels can debut on the site for free, so the first x chapters are always free to begin with. Once a novel proves to be decent enough to draw a reasonable large reader base, the editors would come talk to the authors and bring them under the flag. Afterwards it may take a week or a month before the novel is paywalled. So it's hard to say if the English site would follow the same path, unless QI has plans to bring in original English-based writers and editors (which I doubt).

I really don't get the bit about QI being greedy though, I mean are you really going to accuse a commercial company of wanting to make the most money out of what they own? It's not like they have a gun pointing at your head demanding you to pay up. If you don't like QI just stay away from it, vote with your feet so to speak, or just read pirated versions like the community has done up to now.

 

You guys forget the fact that after those free chapter there is a paywall you will have to pay to get points which is use to read a certain amount of characters the way I see it is another micro transaction bs we all know and hate

 

I also doubt that, which makes me leery of the paywall aspect at all.

Honestly, Qidian isn't really different from a ton of other companies, but that's exactly why we're complaining. We just don't like how they do business and how they're handling this situation, and just because it's a common behavior doesn't mean it's one we should tolerate. At least, that's why I'm complaining, even if nothing changes.

Honestly, for me, it's not that they want to make money. It's not the paywall or anything. It's how they talk to the public, how they try to turn us against Ren with misinformation and lies by omission, and expect to get away with it 'cus they can. It's the complete lack of face given to WW.

 

I don't have much to say. Other than...

I just made a Qidian reading list, so that I could put all 'Qidian only' hosted novels in it.
I gave the list a nice 'RIP icon' and hid the list. I must say it cleaned things up nicely.

On a side note:
I will never 'pay' for a paywall.
I prefer to buy actual books, that give me the whole story.