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The video opens on a woman settling into a chair at Kyobo Book Centre on a weekend afternoon, opening a book in the personal-finance section, and waiting. A caption appears over the footage: “Waiting to be hit on.” Posted in early March, the Instagram reel had racked up 1.98 million views by the time Yonhap News Agency intern reporter Kang Min-ji wrote about it on April 5 — one entry in a fast-growing genre of social posts treating Korea’s largest bookstores as what people online now call “beonddae seongji,” or hunting grounds for getting someone’s phone number. A companion reel, titled “the 41-year-old who gets numbers at Gangnam Kyobo,” shows a man approaching woman after woman with some version of “excuse me, could I get your number” — racking up rejections until, on his fourth attempt, one says yes. That clip pulled 1.03 million views of its own.
What’s spreading alongside the videos is a small industry of tactics. A YouTube video from last November walks through opening lines for approaching a stranger in a bookstore — whether she’s a college student, whether it’s okay to ask her age, whether she comes here alone often. Another argues there’s a specific reason to go to Kyobo at 4 p.m. on a weekend: “someone who reads is probably a decent person.” A KakaoTalk open chatroom Kang accessed on April 2, dedicated entirely to number-getting tips, recommended bookstores by name when a member asked where to approach women during the day. The trend has a name for what’s driving it, too — “text-hip” and “fashion reading,” twin terms for a reading culture in which 20-somethings treat books, and being seen with them, as a form of self-expression rather than just literature.
The case that bookstores are simply where compatible people already are
For the people defending the trend, the appeal isn’t really about hunting — it’s about the alternative being exhausting. Kim Do-yun, a reporter at Gyeongin Maeil who profiled the phenomenon on April 20, described the typical entry point as two strangers reaching for the same book in the philosophy section, a brief exchange, then an exchange of numbers — what he called dating apps’ opposite: no profile to curate, no photo to choose, no sense of selecting a person like a product off a shelf. Kwak Geum-joo, an emeritus psychology professor at Seoul National University, told Yonhap the format works because of a basic mechanism: people are drawn to and trust others who appear to share their interests, and a bookstore broadcasts that compatibility before a word is even exchanged. “Looks may shape a first impression,” she said, “but shared hobbies and values matter more for sustaining a relationship — and a bookstore naturally creates conversation topics that can raise expectations of a connection forming.”
Kim’s reporting ties the trend to a broader retreat from Korea’s old default social glue: alcohol. National Tax Statistics Portal data he cited shows domestic liquor shipments have fallen more than 21 percent since the pandemic, a decline he says reflects more than COVID-19 alone — drinking-based socializing has lost its grip on a generation that increasingly skips it. An Incheon bar owner near a university district, Kim Han-sik, 38, told the outlet that the campus welcome parties and club mixers that used to leave his bar standing-room-only have largely disappeared, replaced by non-alcoholic and zero-sugar drink culture. Independent bookstores and reading meetups, in his framing, have simply taken the slot once held by “drink and bond” nights out — a quieter, more deliberate format for a generation Kim describes as wary of dating’s emotional and financial costs, where roughly two in three people in their 20s aren’t currently in a relationship at all.
The case that this is making an ordinary bookstore trip unbearable
Set against that defense are the people simply trying to read who keep getting approached. An office worker surnamed Jeon, 26, told Yonhap she was “beonddae’d” in the fiction section of Kyobo’s Gangnam store in January: a man circled nearby long enough that she noticed him watching, then asked “did you come alone?” — and when she declined, he kept talking until she felt unsettled enough to move seats. “A bookstore is a quiet space, so it felt more pressuring, and it was awkward to just run off,” she said. A 22-year-old college student described having nearly the same experience twice this year at the Gwanghwamun store with two different men, both opening with some version of “is this book good?” — close enough to a script that the conversation itself felt staged rather than spontaneous. Another woman, 24, said a man showed her a note typed into his phone reading “if you don’t have a boyfriend, give me your number,” leaving her too flustered to do anything but walk away; she said she’d separately heard bookstores described as a place people go to practice pickup lines they learned in a class.
Two more accounts, shared on Threads and relayed to Yonhap through direct messages, follow the same shape. A woman in her late 20s said a man at the Jamsil store approached her while she was reading, telling her “you looked beautiful reading” — a line she found unconvincing enough to turn down, adding that being interrupted in a space she visits to unwind felt invasive rather than flattering. A 23-year-old university student said a man at the Gwanghwamun essay section called her “intellectual” before asking for her number; she declined politely, then watched him deliver what looked like the identical line to another woman just around the corner. “It didn’t feel like he was sincerely interested in me,” she said. “It felt like he was just looking for anyone” — the specific complaint that recurs across nearly every account Yonhap collected: not the approach itself, but how interchangeable the people doing the approaching seem to be.
Why bookstores can’t just make the problem go away
Kyobo has noticed. Signage now posted throughout the Gwanghwamun store reads, “please be considerate so that someone’s precious reading moment isn’t disturbed by unfamiliar conversation or stares — if an unexpected situation makes your visit uncomfortable, don’t hesitate to ask a nearby staff member.” A company representative told Yonhap the wording was deliberately indirect: the chain knows about the issue and is trying to address it without directly policing a behavior it has limited power to stop, given that a bookstore is an open space anyone is free to use. Staff can intervene if a customer flags discomfort directly, the representative said, but the company can’t preemptively bar a customer from striking up a conversation. In the meantime, the self-defense humor has become its own subgenre — a February X post suggesting that if a stranger approaches, you should demand he “name five female authors in under a minute,” and a March Instagram reel coaching viewers to wave the person off with “I have no number to give you — this isn’t a hunting bar!”
What keeps the debate from settling is the gap between the romantic theory and the scripted reality. Kwak’s explanation for why bookstore matchmaking should work — shared interests, an organic conversation starter, lower social pressure than a dating app — assumes the approach is genuine. But nearly every account of being on the receiving end describes something closer to a memorized routine, delivered to whoever happens to be standing in the right section, with bookstores increasingly functioning as a stage for posting proof of the encounter online rather than as a byproduct of actually reading. Kim’s broader framing in Gyeongin Maeil — that the trend reflects a generation applying efficiency and cost-benefit thinking even to romance, after deciding that apps demand too much self-marketing and traditional nightlife has lost its pull — doesn’t resolve whether that’s a healthier way to meet someone or just a new venue for the same transactional impulse. For now, Kyobo’s signage stays deliberately vague, the reels keep racking up views, and the readers who just wanted to finish a chapter are the ones absorbing the cost of figuring out which is which.
Sources: Kang Min-ji, “[샷!] ‘계속 말 걸어 무서웠고 결국 피했다'” (“‘He Kept Talking and I Was Scared and Eventually Fled'”), Yonhap News Agency, April 5, 2026. Kim Do-yun, “‘서점 번따’ MZ세대 기현상? 관계의 효율, 그들은 서점을 택했다” (“‘Bookstore Number-Getting’: An MZ Generation Phenomenon? They Chose Efficiency in Relationships, and Chose Bookstores”), Gyeongin Maeil, April 20, 2026.
