Last Year on PP: Germany’s Answer to Google, Irish Pub News, Kindle Still “Good Enough”

By Edward Nawotka

Eoin Purcell

A year ago this week, we covered the…

• launch of the DDB, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) — the German Digital Library — which planned to connect the databases of 30,000 German cultural and academic organizations and create an Internet portal that would be available to all German citizens. In November and again in mid-December, the DDB announced they’d received several more million euros in funding, bringing the total to eight million in all and proves the government is still behind the project.
• start of publication of Irish Publishing News, which is run by our contributor Eoin Purcell and, among commentary and news bites, offers a weekly top ten list of bestselling Irish titles
• 25 title longlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award…the next longlist will be announced on January 27th. You can find out more information at the prizes’ site.

Finally, we published my own editorial entitled, CES is Not a Book Fair (and Steve Jobs is No Gutenberg), which argued, among other things, that “until books somehow morph into something other than “books,” the e-readers we have are already good enough to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of readers.” It’s interesting to note that nearly a year after the “Jesus Tablet” — as the iPad was then known — Apple’s iBookstore is largely an after-thought and the virtually-unchanged-since-launch Kindle (and Kindle iPad app) is still the dominant platform.