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Search word : "Fandoms",   Search result : 14
[TREND / TOPIC]

Expanding the World of Books Through Book-Themed Merchandise

Topic   Expanding the World of Books Through Book-Themed Merchandise   2025.12.01   The craze for book-themed merchandise   At bookstores and book fairs across the country, what catches the eye as much as the books themselves these days is book-themed merchandise. From bookmarks, postcards, and stickers to keyrings, T-shirts, book covers, incense, and drip-bag coffee, objects orbiting around books have now become a form of publishing content in their own right. According to Kyobo Book Centre’s statistics, sales of reading accessories in 2024 rose by 28% compared to the previous year. The trend was evident at this year’s Seoul International Book Fair (SIBF), where nearly every publisher’s booth displayed merchandise beside their books, and readers purchased these items with enthusiasm equal to the books themselves.Some criticize this shift, arguing that merchandise is overshadowing books and accelerating the commercialization of publishing. However, the ph...
  • VOL.89 / 2025.12
[TREND / KNOWLEDGE]

Korean Publishing Market’s Trends in 2024 and Outlook for 2025

Knowledge   Korean Publishing Market’s Trends in 2024 and Outlook for 2025   2024.12.02         Trends in 2024: Questioning life, fandoms, and Nobel Prize in Literature   Philosophy and psychology books have dominated the Korean publishing market, with Reading Schopenhauer at Forty (Uknowbooks) topping the overall bestseller list through August. Also, 11 of the 30 bestselling fiction titles in the first half of the year were “rebound” titles, meaning they were published more than 10 years ago. In addition, the nonfiction category returned to growth after 4 years of decline, and the cases of books becoming bestsellers after being recommended by celebrities increased.Reading Schopenhauer at Forty has continued to grow in popularity this year after being featured on a TV entertainment series last year. The autho...
  • VOL.77 / 2024.12
[TREND / KNOWLEDGE]

Korean Book Publishers Eye Webnovels and Webtoons

Publishing Industry   Korean Book Publishers Eye Webnovels and Webtoons Why is Dasan Books starting an entertainment business?   2022.04.04   With the global mega-hit of “Squid Game” on Netflix in 2021, the world began to take a greater interest in Korean content. Other webtoon-based dramas, including “Hellbound” and “We Are All Dead,” are seeing good records as well, and Korean webtoon platforms such as Piccoma, Line Manga, and Tapas are rapidly growing in the global market. Now webtoons are rising as the next driver of Korean content, or K-content, which has been represented by K-pop.Korean book publishers are also greatly interested in webtoons and webnovels. General publishers such as Woongjin Thinkbig, Dasan Books, and Wisdom House have shown a clear movement in this regard. It also seems that those that have not yet started a relevant business are paying heed to the webnovel and webtoon business, the newly emerging field in the content industry.  ...
  • VOL.45 / 2022.04
[TREND / TOPIC]

Travelers Return After COVID-19

Topic   Travelers Return After COVID-19   2023.06.05   The trend of travel books in Korea before and after COVID-19   After the Korean government lifted the bar for overseas travel in 1989, the major driver behind the growth of the travel book market in the 1990s was guidebooks, which mainly delivered information about the destination country. The introduction of the Across the World (RH Korea Co., Ltd., formerly published by Random House) series, which was the translated version of the magazine How to Walk on Earth published by Diamond Big in Japan, opened the first generation of travel guidebooks in Korea. In the late 1990s, the second-generation guidebooks such as the Centuplicate Your Joy (RH Korea) series and the Just Go (Sigongsa Co., Ltd.) series published, which the foreign rights were bought from Japanese publishers and translated in Korean. Since then, those series developed along with the revised editions and Korean writers began to actively engag...
  • VOL.59 / 2023.06
[TREND / TOPIC]

Korean Bookstores Dominated by Screenplays and scripts

Topic   Korean Bookstores Dominated by Screenplays and Scripts   2022.11.07   “Do you stop reading screenplays after watching movies in Korea?”“It’s out… ‘in the fullness of time.’”“The ‘unparalleled’ screenplay that I made a ‘decision’ to buy.”“This is the only way to read the best screenplay. What else can I do?”- Comments by fans of the movie “Decision to Leave” on their expectations for the screenplay publication parodying the movie’s lines   The movie “Decision to Leave,” released last June, is the most recent movie written by Chung Seo-Kyung and directed by Park Chan-Wook. It won the Best Director Award at the 75th Cannes Film Festival. The movie’s popularity was not as high as expected soon after its release, but the share of “en cha gamsang (n차 감상, or “n-th watcher”),” who watch the same movie several times, was as high as blockbuster movies. Thanks to its strong fandom, the film was able to run for a long on thea...
  • VOL.52 / 2022.11
[INFORMATION / NEW BOOKS]

What If You Encountered Your Own Clone One Day?

New Books   What If You Encountered Your Own Clone One Day?     2026.05     Can Hate Be Replicated?, Yoon, Hye-seong, 2026.   Yoon, Hye-seong’s debut novel, Can Hate Be Replicated?, has been released as part of the "Short Series" by Safe House (Anjeongaok), a publisher specializing in genre fiction. Safe House is a production studio that creates and distributes stories for "fandoms" of genres such as SF, fantasy, mystery, horror, and romance. Author Yoon previously co-wrote the script for the K-drama 〈The Dream Life of Mr. Kim〉. While that drama offered a realistic and satirical portrayal of the lives of Korean office workers, Can Hate Be Replicated? explores a deeply human story of alienation, conflict, and the eventual downfall of a couple facing extreme suffering. The novel is categorized as a "Gyeong-jangpyeon," a format that can be described as a novella—a medi...
  • VOL.94 / 2026.05
[INFORMATION / BEST SELLERS]

Which Foreign Books Did Korean Readers Choose in 2025?

    Best Sellers   Which Foreign Books Did Korean Readers Choose in 2025?     2026.02     "Interest in Korean fiction" is an indispensable phrase when explaining recent publishing trends in Korea. Thanks to the halo effect of Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature win in 2024, Korean novels swept the top spots on the comprehensive bestseller lists last year. The slump in non-fiction books, driven by the commercialization of generative artificial intelligence (AI), also played a significant role. The prevailing view in the industry is that the surge in Korean fiction—and Korean literature at large—is a "butterfly effect" resulting from the contraction of the local non-fiction market, a sector traditionally dominated by renowned foreign authors rather than domestic ones. However, this situation may present a unique opportuni...
  • VOL.91 / 2026.02
[TREND / TOPIC]

Fandom and Publishing

Topic   Fandom and Publishing Trend in the Korean publishing market in 2022   2022.09.05   I have talked with a number of editors from publishing companies about “profitable books.” They all said, “The results are mostly determined by how influential the author is. How many readers it can attract is also one of the key points of signing a contract.”While fewer people are reading books, more people hope to write books today. So, among the manuscripts flooding in, the writers who sign the contract at the end are those who are influential. The marketing capacity of the publisher is indeed important. But, in this market where capital decides the marketing power, it is more likely that you must bring in “people that don’t read” to make a book go best seller. Thus, it is clear that a publishing company prefers to publish books by those with a strong fandom, created before publication.      ...
  • VOL.50 / 2022.09
[TREND / SPECIAL PROJECT]

K-Fantasy

Special Project   K-Fantasy We Invite You to a Special Universe that No One's Ever Dreamed of   2021.09.06   "If I had magic..." Everybody must have imagined becoming a magician as a child. We make so many unrealistic things possible thanks to the imagination. We fly through the sky, and we walk under the sea. Korean fantasy began to flourish when computers and the Internet began to be distributed across the country in the mid-1990s. As novels serialized on online platforms that only provided writing and reading services gained more popularity and proved their commercial values, the publication of fantasy novels started to occur in earnest. Fandoms emerged as fantasy books were distributed to local book lenders in massive amounts. The spread of smartphones and tablets in 2010 led to the full development of fantasy novels and web-novels. Fantasy as a genre has been steadily gathering fanatics, expanding its universe and combining with other genres such as martial arts fan...
  • VOL.38 / 2021.09
[INTERVIEW / KOREAN AUTHORS]

Writer Song Gil-Young

Korean Authors   Writer Song Gil-Young A clear-cut forecast of the times provided by a man who “mines” the minds of the time   2024.07.01   One book published last year made headlines and became a bestseller. It is Forecast of the Times: Era of Nuclear Individuals (Kyobo Book Centre), which brought about a sensation by claiming that a new era of individuals called “nuclear individuals” has arrived due to the development of AI technologies and aging populations. The book’s writer, Song Gil-Young, calls himself a “mind miner,” meaning a person who mines the minds of the time using big data. As he precisely pinpoints the changes of the time through big data analysis more than anyone else, his latest title, Forecast of the Times: Era of Nuclear Individuals, provides insights into various fields. This book can be regarded as the extension of Just Don’t Do It (Book Stone) and Do Not Imagine (Book Stone), his previous titles offering advice for the future. Song...
  • VOL.72 / 2024.07
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