Now, Webtoon, the subsidiary of the South Korean giant Naver, hopes to bring this literary format back to life through its new application, Yonder.
Yonder offers a catalogue of several hundred works of fiction in a wide variety of literary genres. With romance, fantasy, comedy, thriller, science fiction and more, there’s something for everyone.
However, readers will have to be patient if they hope to read them all, as all the novels available on Yonder are published chapter by chapter, following in the tradition of serialised fiction, with new content coming every day and even every hour, says the Webtoon’s application’s website.
Literature fans will also be able to read several episodes of the same literary series for free, to find out if they want to continue reading. If they do, they will have to use virtual tokens to buy the different instalments of the novel that caught their attention.
“On Yonder, the more you read, the more you get, with rewards and perks to read even more,” Hwalin Oh, Yonder’s president, said in a statement.
The idea behind Yonder is not new in itself, as it is based on the idea of serialized novels, literary series published periodically in newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
If this format has since fallen out of fashion, it has found a new digital incarnation in web novels.
These digital novels are specially designed to be read on a screen, which allows them to break away from traditional narrative patterns to better fit readers’ expectations. This freedom of form explains, in part, the success of web novels in China.
This has inspired Yonder to build its catalogue. The application has partnered with publishers such as Blackstone Publishing, Aethon Books, Sterling and Stone, Portal Books and Wraithmarked, to offer its users popular literary series and new releases.
Users can read a serialized adaptation of Alphatart’s “The Remarried Empress,” the hit web novel that has already been read more than 1.5 billion times on the Webtoon platform, or “YA House of Night” by P C Cast and Kristin Cast.
Exclusives include “Gravesong,” a spin-off of the popular literary series “The Wandering Inn” by LitRPG Pirateaba, and “Bound to the Shadow Prince” by Ruby Dixon.
For Sue Johnson, chief content officer of Yonder, the return of serialized fiction offers many potential possibilities for the book world.
“Mobile serialised fiction can unlock creative new ways for authors to tell incredible stories and offers an enormous back catalogue opportunity for publishers.
“We live in an exciting era for readers, authors, and publishers where storytelling technology platforms have made new fiction formats more accessible to a global audience,” she explained in a statement.
Yonder will soon be available (in English) as an application, compatible with iOS and Android.