On Wednesday evening in a small bookshop located a little away from the bustling university district of Shinchon gathered a dozen people: some in suits, some in casual jeans.
With glasses of Big Wave Golden Ale, a Hawaiian beer, in one hand, people started to share their experiences as beer fans.
It was a beverage tasting night at booknpub, a small bookshop that sells coffee and beer in western Seoul.
The bookstore, which opened in April, has a number of events, ranging from movie screenings to mini-concerts and poetry readings.
"When I opened this place, I thought of it more as a cultural space where visitors can experience minor music, arts and meet people rather than where you just buy books," store owner Kim Jong-hyun said.
The crisis of the publishing industry is no longer news. It has been more than a decade since the number of bookstores in South Korea was at a downturn.
From 3,589 in 2003, the figure shrunk by more than a thousand to 2,331 in 2013. It is down 9.6 percent from 2,557 in 2011, according to a biennial report published by the Korea Federation of Bookstore Association. The figure for 2015 will not be available until next year.
It was mainly giant booksellers, online and offline, such as Yes24, Youngpoong Bookstore and Kyobo Book Center that pushed small bookshops out of the market.
When those small ones started to re-appear on the scene, however, their competitors were no longer the giant sellers.
At first, they started off with independent publications, which are not sold at major bookstores, where big publishing companies and market ideology hold the dominance.
Now for most of the independent bookshops, no matter how they specialize themselves -- whether by selling beer or holding discussion sessions -- the goal has evolved into providing personalized experiences to the visitors.
Sunny Books, the first bookshop dealing with contents on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in South Korea, opened in September in the popular foreigner district of Itaewon in central Seoul.
Within a space smaller than 20 square meters, Park Chul-hee, the owner of the store, prepared new and used books, magazines, postcards and props he gathered in and outside of South Korea, where the discourse on sexual minorities is still marginalized.
South Korea, roughly a third of whose population is Christian, remains relatively closed off to sexual minorities.
In a Pew Research Center survey published in 2013, 39 percent of South Koreans said the society should accept LGBTs, compared with 59 percent of naysayers.
Contents in the bookshop range from a thick theory book on sexuality to adult comics.
"I thought the culture for LGBTs in this country was too limited, focused only on the nightlife," Park said. "I wanted to make a space where LGBTs could enjoy diverse contents in the daytime."
As a two-month old bookshop, the number of visitors is not huge, but most people who visit the shop, willingly taking the effort to come all the way up an alley, tend to show more loyalty with high buying rates.
"From the beginning, my goal was to provide a community rather than just selling books," Park said. In the coming months, he plans to host related workshops and events.
As small neighboring bookshops tend to have specific themes of their own, such as fiction-only or travel book-only, they often attract people with similar tastes and interests.
When active use of Social Network Services, such as Instagram, Facebook and blogging, are added on to that, a solid bond is created between the shops and visitors.
Sunny Books' Facebook page, which launched months before the shop's opening, also serves as an active communication platform.
Park shared the whole process of opening the shop from making a contract with the place to ordering books, forming a sense of attachment with its followers.
The communication goes beyond issues in the bookshop.
When the 16th Korea Queer Festival was held in Seoul in June, the Facebook page, which shared photos related to the event, turned into a forum of fierce debate over homosexuality.
As these new small bookshops do not coincide with the traditional concept of bookshops, some remain skeptical.
"It seems like today bookshops have to become more than about books, which for me is quite sad as I think books are whole amazing worlds in themselves," said Juliette Schwak, an avid French reader visiting South Korea.
"We see bookshops selling coffee along with books, but if the number of books is not huge, it is not clear whether we should regard them as a cafe or a bookstore," said Sung Mi-hee, an official from the Korea Federation of Bookstore Association.
"Nevertheless, it is true that they are doing well by making bookstores more trendy and attractive places, and if that contributes to increasing the reading population in the country, we welcome that," Sung added.
Reflecting the increased interest in minor publications, on a recent rainy weekend at Gwanghwamun in central Seoul, people lined up for up to an hour to get into a museum where a local book fair was being held.
At the 7th Unlimited Edition, an annual art book fair showcasing small-scale and independent publications, about 13,000 visited over two days, soaring from 8,000 last year and 900 at its beginning in 2009.
People mostly in their 20s and 30s went to the venue to explore creative works of writers and artists.
"I bought a magazine and two postcards to decorate my room," a 23-year-old college student Kim Yu-rim said. "The great part is that I can develop a style, a taste of my own with these diversified small-quantity products."
When we look at foreign cases, independent publishing is more successful when it is regarded as an art, not just within the realm of writers and writings, said Iro, the chief director of the festival.
"Now the boundary of creation has gone far beyond making books.
It is hard to define them with existing terms like writer," he added. "They direct stuff, publish them, make posters and CDs. It is an aggregation of all that."
Jung Mi-jin, the head of the independent publisher atnoonbooks, which makes picture books for adults, and a writer herself, explained the phenomenon as readers being tired of mass-produced and ready-made contents.
"Just like underground musicians gained popularity when the public started to feel weary of the pop music, the demand for independent publishing and small bookshops seems to stem from a desire for something new and different," Jung said. (Yonhap
