Actually, you only get to read the newest chapters with their subscription. So if you wanna read a new manga you're not caught up on you get to pay out the ass for it, that's the part I consider a scam. And really the $5 sub is pretty bare bones, the $10 one is probably the more realistic option for most people, although either way the quality overall is pretty low for any paid service at all imo. And they barely "give back to the authors".
1. You have no idea what the publishing rights consist of, so saying they barely give anything back seems wrong. And if they do, that comes down to the Japanese publishers not asking for enough. They are the ones making the deals. This is the same crap people have said for years "The Artists barely make anything from CD sales!" well yeah they might only make 80 cents on a sale, but that adds up when they are selling hundreds of thousands of CDs.
2. Almost everyone I know who uses Jnovel uses the $5 option, the $10 one is good too, but I never saw the point of it since I don't need to buy the manga/LNs from them since I'm reading them while they are streaming. The only difference is a discount on LN sales and $7 of coins
3. They always put six series on catchup each month, so you can easily read 30 volumes worth of stuff for $5. Like, you do realize how cheap $5 is right? Buying ONE volume off of Amazon costs more then that.
The one bad thing I will say about JNovel is, as the same implies, it has a focus on LNs. There ARE manga, but far less than the number of LNs they have. So most months they only have one manga on catchup, so if you are only there to read manga it might not be worth it.
And lets be real with each other...if you really wanted to just pay the membership fees but not buy the volumes you could just pirate them until you were caught up. But yeah I do agree it would be nice if the $10 tier just let you read whatever you wanted.
Like, I'm not agaist scanning...I'm on here after all (And I'm all for fan scans of things that aren't being published), actually I need to get back to scanning the next chapter of Akuma Koujo......, but pretending a site that let's you access thousands of hours of LNs for $5 a month is a scam is just silly. Like, just say "I don't feel like paying because I'm cheap and would rather use it to buy a couple beers"