Story24 (스토리24)

» see story24.yes24.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Yes24 is one of the big Korean online bookstores, and Story24 was the last name on its web novel platform. The Korean Wikipedia entry describes it as a 여성향 site, fiction aimed at women readers, and records one structural fact about how it changed: in the earlier version readers could register and serialize their own novels, and the free-serialization section was taken out when the name changed to Story24. So it became more of a storefront and less of a submission platform on the way to its final form. It closed on 30 April 2026.

The usual problem with a grave like this is that the evidence has to be reassembled from archive captures and encyclopedia sentences. Not here. story24.yes24.com still answers, and what it serves is the shutdown notice itself, titled 스토리24 서비스 종료 안내, signed off by Yes24. The company says it is terminating the service as of 1 May 2026 for service integration and operational efficiency. Then it thanks the customers and sends them to the Yes24 eBook app.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names ~

Before it was Story24 it was 시프트북스, ShiftBooks, and before that it was YES24 e연재, which is only the retailer's name with the Korean word for serialization stuck on the end. That is the name of a feature inside a bookstore. Yes24 ran writing contests off it for years, a third e연재 competition in 2016 and a fourth under the ShiftBooks name in 2019.

The ShiftBooks years are badly dated and I am not going to pretend otherwise. One industry reference calls ShiftBooks a 2013 platform built on e연재. A 2018 newspaper piece calls it a platform Yes24 opened the previous year. Those cannot both be right, and nothing available settles it, which is why the birth year on this page is the Story24 name itself: the app launched in 2020 and the first archive capture of the address is 29 October that year.

~ what moved and what did not ~

Anything bought outright went across. Yes24 told customers to look under 구매한 책 in the eBook app and find their Story24 titles there. Rented chapters stayed readable for the remainder of whatever rental period was already paid for, and then stopped, because they could not be transferred. Separately, titles that had already been pulled from sale over copyright or distribution-rights problems were left out of the migration altogether.

That last category is the one worth noticing. A book can disappear from a platform before the platform disappears, and when the shutdown comes those are the titles with nowhere to land. The platform closing is a scheduled event with a notice page. The quieter removals that preceded it got no notice at all.

~ the clearance ~

Story24 is one line in a two-year clearing of the Korean web novel and webtoon field. Kyobo's Tocsoda went first, on 31 December 2024. Munpia closed Honeymoon on 25 September 2025 and NCSoft ended Bufftoon on 17 December 2025. Mopic did not close so much as change species, turning into an AI fiction site called 쿼터풀 on 7 May 2026. Two more were on the calendar behind Story24: Blice, run by KT, for 30 June 2026, and Bookpal, which Yes24 itself had acquired, for the day after that. The Korean Wikipedia still files both as 예정, scheduled, so nobody has gone back to confirm either one.

Which means Yes24 closed its own platform in April and put the one it had bought on the calendar for July, both inside the same year.

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