Starfield Library at COEX Mall, Seoul: Are Those Books Actually Real?

Same day as Bukchon and Cafe Onion, still working through the snacks we picked up there. The croffle I kept calling a waffle was as good on the second half as it was on the first, especially the strawberry granola one. Then we ended up underground in Gangnam at Starfield COEX Mall, because I had heard there was a library inside a mall and I wanted to see what that actually meant.

The Malls Are Not Dead Here

First thing that hit me, before anything to do with books: this place was packed.

Back home the mall near us is a parking lot with a building attached. Everybody orders online, a third of the storefronts are papered over, and the ones still open are cell phone kiosks and a massage chair demo. Outside America the malls are still popping off. This is the third country in a row where I have walked into one on a random weekday afternoon and had to weave through people.

That is the cinema level, and it tells you what this place actually is. A Megabox with a Dolby house, a coffee shop one floor down, a movie wall the size of a building, and people just sitting on the floor in front of it on a Wednesday afternoon. Nobody is here on a mission to buy one specific thing.

COEX is a big part of why. It is the largest underground shopping mall in Asia, and it sits directly on top of Samseong Station on Line 2, which means the mall is not somewhere you drive to. It is somewhere you pass through on the way to something else. That is a completely different business than a mall surrounded by 4,000 parking spaces off a freeway exit.

The Samsung Price Check

I got curious. We are in Korea, this is Samsung’s home country, so the phones have to be cheaper here. Right?

I found a Galaxy S25, 256GB, international version, since that is what I would need for it to actually work back in the States. It was about 1.1 million won. The Korean list price on that model was ₩1,155,000, so roughly $840 depending on the exchange rate at the time.

The US price for the same phone at launch was $859.99.

So it is a wash. Worse than a wash, honestly, because the Korean sticker already includes the 10% VAT and the American one does not include sales tax yet. Buying a Samsung in Samsung’s home country saves you nothing. And I have Google Fi, where upgrading to an S25 was running around half off, which is not close. Sitting in a mall in Gangnam doing that math on my phone was a genuinely funny moment.

Worth knowing if you were thinking about it seriously: phones sold on the Korean domestic market have a camera shutter sound baked in at the firmware level, 60 to 68 decibels, mandated since 2004 and not something you can switch off. Korea and Japan are the only two countries in the world that regulate this. So even if the price had been better, a Korean-market unit is not the one you want to carry home.

I use Google Fi for international data and that is a referral link, which means we both get credit if you sign up through it. I would be using it either way. It is the reason my phone just works the second we land somewhere, with no SIM shopping and no airport kiosk.

The Library in the Middle of the Mall

Then we found it, and I stopped talking for a second, which does not happen often on camera.

Starfield Library, or Byeolmadang, is not tucked into a corner unit. It is the middle of the mall. An open atrium of about 2,800 square meters with three bookshelf towers running 13 meters up, roughly 43 feet, holding around 70,000 books and 600 magazines, though take that count as the whole wall rather than the part you can use. Shinsegae opened it in 2017 and put over 6 billion won into it, and the American firm Gensler designed it.

I called it the Apple store of books on camera and I stand by that. The scale of it does the same thing an Apple store does, which is make you feel like you wandered into the future by accident. Free to walk in, free to sit, tables with power outlets, and a Starbucks right there.

It is also warm in there, which I said out loud and will say again. Big glass atrium, thousands of bodies, afternoon sun. Bring a bottle of water.

Are Those Books Real?

That is the whole question I kept asking, so here is the answer I did not have while filming.

Partly. And there is a hard line where it changes.

Real books go up to the sixth shelf. Everything above that is what the library itself calls fake books, and a Byeolmadang official put it plainly to a Korean news team: that part is decoration, and only the books up to the sixth shelf are usable.

The ones up top are hollow models, lightweight, and treated to be flame retardant. The reason is not that somebody was being cheap. It is weight. Fill 13 meters of shelving with real paper and you are hanging tons of load over a crowded atrium, which is a shelf collapse waiting to happen and a serious problem in an earthquake or a fire.

They were installed during construction by workers on cranes, placed one at a time and fixed in position, and they are never swapped out. The shelves you can actually reach get around a thousand new books curated in every month.

So my instinct at the bottom of it, saying “I thought these are like photos of books,” was closer than the answer I talked myself into thirty seconds later. What I had wrong was where the line falls. I assumed it was somewhere absurdly high up, past any possible ladder. It is at the sixth shelf, which is barely above head height.

That is not a scam, and it does not ruin the place for me. Once you know the reason is load-bearing, the alternative is not a taller ladder, it is a shorter wall. The wall is architecture. The shelves you can reach are the library. Both of those things get to be true at once.

And No, You Cannot Borrow Them

The other thing I got wrong. I said on camera that you could probably take one home and bring it back, because isn’t that what a library is.

You cannot. There is no checkout, no card, no lending. You read it there and you put it back before you leave. It is a reading room dressed as a library, sitting inside a mall, open daily until 10 PM.

Which, once I stopped being annoyed about it, is a fair trade. A lending library needs membership, addresses, late fees, staff, a way to chase down the book. This needs none of that, so it can stay open to a hundred thousand people a day who are only passing through on their way to the aquarium.

I Still Miss Borders

I said it in the video and I meant it. I was never a Barnes and Noble guy. I was a Borders guy. I had the rewards card. I would go with no plan and leave two hours later with something I had not heard of that morning.

Borders has been gone since 2011, and nothing replaced the thing it actually did, which was give you a big warm room full of books that you were allowed to be in without buying anything.

Korea built one in the middle of a shopping mall and made it free.

Here is the part I did not plan. While I was putting this post together, I was also boxing up my old web development books to donate to our library, and this fell out of one of them.

A Borders Rewards bookmark. No cost, no card, no hassle. The store has been closed for over a decade and the bookmark is still doing its job, still trying to sign somebody up.

Look at what it was holding. Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger. Rails: Up and Running. Joomla. CakePHP. An O’Reilly registration card I never filled out and never mailed. That is a very specific stretch of my life sitting in the back of a car, and most of it is out of date to the point of being useless as reference. The paper is fine. The information is not.

So they are going to the library. Somebody’s kid can learn what a stored procedure is, or at least what one used to look like.

Which is the whole thing, really. Starfield has 70,000 books, some of them are props, and none of them are allowed to leave. My stack would not fill one shelf of that wall, all of it is real, and every last one is walking out the door on purpose.

We were not done for the day, either. The last stop was a Costco in Seocho-gu, where I priced this same phone again and found the hot dog cheaper than it is at home.

If you are just picking up this series, it starts with landing at Incheon and our first night in Myeongdong.

This post is based on our travel vlog. Watch the full video below for all the moments, reactions, and footage from the day.