(Not really) bestselling in ... South Korea

       Usually every couple of months in the US you hear of some case where a publisher or author tries to game the bestseller lists through bulk sales (and purchases) of a title, artificlally inflating sales totals. In South Korea the game apparently works differently, as Kim Tong-hyung reports in The Korea Times in Plot turns for the worse that publishers:

stockpiled large volumes of the books and fraudulently represented them as being sold

       Needless to say, such:

Allegations that publishers are inflating the sales of books are another scandal the country's terminally ill book market can do without.

       As one person suggests:

This represents the state of the Korean publishing market, which has become a black hole that sucks up everything except for books listed as bestsellers. Industry people talk about how big bookstores and online retailers will concentrate on promoting the books they anticipate will be absorbed by the publishers themselves, rather than the works they think will appeal to readers the most.

       Indeed, Kim is anything but sanguine:

Through a wave of consolidation that accompanied the bad economy in the past decade, the market is now dominated by mega retail chains like Kyobo Bookstore and a few large corporations that control the most influential publishing houses. Diversity was hurt as small publishers were driven out or marginalized, an intellectual vacuum epitomized by the slew of self-help books that are often worse than useless.