W1. How easy is it to publish a book? - Gyongmin, Moon 문경민

Basically, there are three ways to publish a book. First, it's self-publishing: which is that the writer supply for all the money on the process of bookmaking and he/she does all the job of it too. Second is one's-own-expense publishing: which is to pay money to a publishing company and let them do the bookmaking, distribution, and also the advertisement with extra cost. The final way is planned-publishing: The publishing company selects the manuscript that has been submitted or has won the prize in their own contest. Printed book publishing needs a lot of work such as editing, bookmaking, distributing. So it is a hard job for non-professional publishers to do it all by themselves. understandably, this made the early 2000's publishing process mostly of planned-publishing.

But, the situation never stays the same forever. Over the past few years, the preference for paper books is decreasing, and as its rebound, the preference for E-books is increasing. It's because of the MZ generation, which refers to those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who lived most of their life with computers and smartphones. Now, in 2020, more of them are becoming financially independent from their parents and leading to a decrease in demand for paper books, and obviously, this made the cost for book publishing, both paper and E-book since E-book needs less cost from its nature, to drop.

In this changing environment, a new form of book publishing service; 'small scale publishing company' is arising. According to KPIPA(Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea, 한국출판문화산업진흥원)'s support standard, a small scale publishing company refers to a publishing company that has less than 5 people as employees. Most of the recent well-known small scale publishing company is made out of 2, 3 people or representative only. KPIPA also said that between the year of 2013 and 2016, about 8,500 publishing company was established and among them, about 1,200 is small scale publishing company.

This was the first time that I heard about this 'small scale publishing company' so I searched for a few, and found a company named BOOKK(부크크). As I surfed through its website, I found that publishing a book is much more than simple.

As you can see above, all you have to do to publish your book is follow 6 steps. Size, color or black&white, paper texture, design of the book, number of pages and so on. If you are finished with all the things, the money you have to pay is automatically shown on the bottom right and within 1~2 days, the books are ready to be printed if a buyer exists. This whole process can be assumed as the second way of publishing; one's-own-expense publishing, you pay money and let the company do the jobs. Besides the fact that it's much easier than the self-publishing and planned-publishing, it is also easier than its conventional form since all you need to do is click your mouse and have money to pay.

As suggested, publishing a book is really easy nowadays. No one checks what contents you wrote in your book, you don't have to get recognition of commercial viability from anyone, and possibly you'll get more portion of money from selling your book. Making a process simple and rational is a good thing. But books are still found to be 'official-like' and 'educational' to many people. I'm not saying the easy book publication is a bad thing. I think it's a natural development as the world is changing. But to prevent this numeral number of information to be all accepted as a piece of 'permitted information', I do believe we also need to change and develope a new form of attitude education against information that tells the receiver and sender of information to be aware of what they are doing.