Steve Jobs' new biography, on iBooks, on an iPad, taken with an iPhone. Photocredit: PAW
It was a sad day for Apple, and a sad day for the world on Wednesday, as Apple’s one time supremo Steve Jobs finally succumbed to his battle with cancer. The man who revolutionised (according to some) the way we read with the elegant iBook store on the iPad, and the man who made us all put “i” in front of everything, will now have his own, well, plain and simple book.
Now Jobs’ authorised biography will be published by Simon and Schuster on the 24th October. It has been written by Walter Isaacson, (a bestselling author, and erstwhile managing editor of Time magazine who also worked at CNN, and is now president of Aspen, a think tank.) He met Jobs right up until his death. According to the LA Times, Jobs was aware of his approaching demise, and wanted to reach out to Isaacson.
Bluewater Publishing will also be putting out its 32-page comic book e-book, which is called Steve Jobs: Co-Founder of Apple. According to Comicbook blog, it’s written by CW Cooke, and illustrated by Chris Schmidt, though details of the plot are, ahem, sketchy, although it doesn’t look like it will involve superheroes.
[The cover of the comic book]
“I wanted my kids to know me,” Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson, quoted in The Guardian.
What do we know about the book?
1. Candid. It’s based on 40 interviews with the man himself, and over 100 interviews with others – and not just friends, at that, but colleagues and even business competitors, said The Guardian. The Economic Times quoted Simon and Schuster as saying that Jobs spoke “candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against.”
2. Free rein. Jobs asked for no creative control. “He put nothing off-limits,” said Walter Isaacson, quoted in The Guardian. According to The Economic Times, the excitement comes from a peek into the “carefully controlled” image that he projected, and it’s likely to sell in the millions.
3. It’s the first authorised biography. There was another: iCon: The Second Greatest Act in the History of Business, by Jeffrey S Young and William L Simon, which caused Jobs some kerfuffle, leading him to pull books published by J Wiley from the Apple Store, according to Endgadget.
4. Top dog. It’s already the No 1 selling book on Amazon. (At the time of writing, the second is Sew by Cath Kidston.)
5. iBible. It used to be called, somewhat biblically, “iSteve: The Book of Jobs”, but is now just simply (and perhaps even more biblically) “Steve Jobs”, stated the LA Times.
