The biggest talking point in Korea's publishing industry right now is the planned sale of Munhakdongne. Kang Byung-sun, the founder and former chief executive, is seeking to sell the entire 41.5% stake. Several companies are said to have expressed interest, and the price being discussed runs into tens of billions of won.
Munhakdongne is the country's largest trade book publisher. It posted revenue of 36.9 billion won and operating profit of 7.1 billion won last year. Revenue fell 20% and operating profit 44% from a year earlier, but it is hard to pin that entirely on the broader slump in publishing. Many analysts see it as a return to normal levels as the boost from novelist Han Kang's 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature faded quickly. The publisher's content lineup remains strong. It recently secured Korean-language rights to "Kaho," the new novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and Han's next book is also due out from Munhakdongne.
So why sell a publisher whose results are not bad? People in the industry link the sale less to financial trouble than to a shift in what publishing covers and how it makes money. Houses are moving beyond printing and selling books to stretch literary intellectual property into other kinds of content and open up new revenue streams.
One publisher stands out in the middle of that shift: Minumsa. The so-called "Minumsa bread," launched recently with the convenience store chain GS25, sold more than 1 million units in about a month and drew wide attention. The products were named after literary works such as "Pride and Prejudice" and "On Love," and each came with a randomly inserted transparent bookmark to feed the urge to collect. The point was to give people who rarely set foot in a bookstore a natural encounter with books.
Minumsa's strength lies in not depending on one or two star authors. Its core asset is the World Literature Collection, the first series by a Korean publisher to pass 500 titles. According to Kyobo Book Centre, 12 titles from the Minumsa collection — including "Siddhartha," "Demian" and "The Stranger" — ranked among the top 30 foreign fiction bestsellers in the first half of this year. The main readers of these classics are women in their 20s and 30s. Behind that seemingly odd pairing of classic literature and younger readers is social media. Instagram, YouTube and TikTok have become new channels through which young people discover and consume books.
Minumsa has leaned into that change. Its official YouTube channel, Minumsa TV, has 570,000 subscribers. The editors and marketers who appear on it have become familiar influencers, and interest in the books they introduce or recommend has risen with them. At the Gwanghwamun branch of Kyobo Book Centre recently, I overheard a young woman ask a friend, "Do you like Minumsa books?" A kind of reader has emerged who thinks of the publisher's name before the author or the title. It is a scene that shows a publisher has become a cultural brand, not just a place that makes books.
As social media and streaming services spread and the reading population shrinks, anxiety in the industry is growing. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's 2025 survey on national reading habits, more than six in 10 adults did not read a single book in a year.
But a crisis can also be an opening. Even in an age of not reading, a "text hip" trend has taken hold among people in their 20s and 30s, who consume reading as a matter of taste and style. As fewer people read, reading has instead emerged as a way to signal a taste and personality different from everyone else's.
The days when a book sold simply because a popular author's title sat on a bookstore display table are over, because the way readers encounter and enjoy books has changed. If the planned sale of Munhakdongne is a signal of how publishing is changing, Minumsa's experiments are an example of how a publisher can respond. What matters now is extending the content a publisher owns into various forms and building new points of contact with readers. From here on, a publisher's competitiveness will be decided not by a single bestseller but by its ability to create new readers and new markets.
