[@NekoMizu][@tsukune] I read Nancy Drew in first grade.  YA novels have considerable flair.  Since books for kids can include very flowery language, and since adults do read light novels, I'm not seeing a good division here.

I mean that the focus plot is split up.  There will be no introduction/rising action/climax/denouement to a single book, which most books in a series do have (though there are exceptions where things end on cliffhangers).  But usually those are new complications and twists leading into a new one-book plot  in the next installment.  Thus, the background plot might span several volumes in a series, but there's a smaller plot in each book, and that is usually the focus.  I meant books where there is no real plot arc in each volume, but where, instead, each book is more like one chapter of a story.  Anime is not always episodic, in fact a lot of the ones I watch are not.  The most obvious example I can think of is DBZ, though I don't watch it.  And manga versions of things like InuYasha, Detective Conan, and Rurouni Kenshin have short "chapters" based on the fact that they are released in weekly installments.  The actual plot arc spans several of these chapters, and even a collected print volume won't start and finish a single plot, but are instead rather arbitrary in many cases.  The idea isn't that there can't be longer plots -- there's almost always /something/ to tie things in the same series together, even if it's just the characters (Nancy Drew, and various different mystery series that I've read, usually have few connections from one case to the next, just as a detective's case last month may be entirely different from the one they're working on now).

So you're saying that light novels do have a complete plot in each volume, in most cases?  Welp, definitely wrong on that point, then.  No idea what T and OT are, and I remember older books often have the occasional illustration -- the Nancy Drews, for example, had a handful of pictures through the book.  Maybe five.

It sounds to me that light novels are more a stylistic designation.  Thus, you could have a novel written in light-novel style.  I mean, a novel is simply "a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism" -- though you could totally get rid of the second half of that, since many novels do (I'm looking at you, Hitchhiker's Guide!  <3).  There's no specific style, but often it seems that it needs to be several chapters long, or a hundred to three hundred pages to qualify.  Less than that adn I don't often hear a book called a novel.  So a book of two hundred pages, dialogue heavy and very light on descriptions, and with no complicated words (though I'd argue the last one, because really, you can be poetic without flowery words, and there's no good lines to separate them) -- this would be a novel and a light novel at the same time, by what you've said.