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Sometimes, flipping channels at night here in Korea, I run across a show about Youtubers. Each episode features three different creators of online video content (or\u00a0kontencheu<\/em>, as it\u2019s commonly rendered in\u00a0Konglish<\/a>) and documents each of them making a representative episode of their series. The host comments on the footage together with the vloggers, asking questions and making the occasional joke to complement the barrage of onscreen text and graphics that characterizes the modern TV aesthetic here. Some of the guests do cooking shows, some do comedy shows, and some go in more idiosyncratic directions. (The 29-year-old pharmacist who painstakingly recreates K-pop music videos, entirely by himself in his small room down in Daegu, comes to mind.)<\/p>\n
Seeing this show reminds me how much television Korea makes \u2014 I haven\u2019t watched even 10 percent of the channels in my cable package \u2014 as well as how much internet video it makes. When the world hears about Koreans broadcasting themselves, it usually hears about things like\u00a0meokbang<\/em>\u00a0(\uba39\ubc29), those live streams of young people eating large quantities of food that made Westerners scratch their heads a couple years ago. But the\u00a0society of screens<\/a>\u00a0cannot live by ingestion alone, and Korean vlogging has grown capacious enough to accommodate more esoteric pursuits, up to and including the reading books. America has its book vloggers as well, of course, but none of them seem to have reached quite the proportional level of fame quite as quickly as, say, Kim Kyeoul (a name she translates as Winter Kim, which doesn\u2019t exude the same hippie-parents vibe in Korea as it would in America), creator and host of the Youtube channel\u00a0Winter Bookstore<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Kim has put up more than 120 episodes since she started Winter Bookstore at the beginning of last year, most of them shot in front of her filled-to-capacity bookshelves, all of them dealing with one subject or another related to books. She leads tours of those bookshelves, she gives reading recommendations, she describes her own reading methods (not neglecting such details as her preferred style of marginalia-making and which brand of coffee-cup warmer she uses), she compares translations of foreign books and electronic reading devices, she reads sections of books out loud (including my personal favorite Los Angeles novel, Christopher Isherwood\u2019s\u00a0A Single Man<\/em><\/a>), she goes to publishers\u2019 sales up in\u00a0Paju Book City<\/a>. Occasionally an episode crosses over with another cultural vlogger\u2019s series, as when she gets together with a movie specialist to compare and contrast\u00a0Stephen King\u2019s\u00a0The Shining<\/em>\u00a0with Stanley Kubrick\u2019s version<\/a>, or\u00a0Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?\u00a0<\/em>with\u00a0Blade Runner<\/em><\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n