Jobs Biography Is Highly Anticipated-The Media Decoder

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October 5, 2011

Jobs Biography Is Highly Anticipated

By JULIE BOSMAN


For months, a biography of Steven P. Jobs has been one of the
most highly anticipated books of the year.

Mr. Jobs’s death on Wednesday will only intensify interest in the book, which was written by Walter Isaacson, the author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, cooperated with Mr. Isaacson in the book about his life, agreeing to more than 40 interviews over two years. Mr. Isaacson, the chief executive of the Aspen Institute, also conducted interviews with Mr. Jobs’s family members and colleagues at Apple.

The book was first announced by Simon & Schuster in April,
bearing the title “iSteve: The Book of Jobs,” and scheduled for a
spring 2012 publication. Simon & Schuster later moved up the release date to Nov. 21 of this year and changed the title to the simpler “Steve Jobs.”

The publisher has said that Mr. Jobs did not ask for control
over the content of the book, and that Mr. Jobs spoke “candidly,
sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against.”

On Thursday evening, the book was ranked No. 384 on Amazon.com, thanks to early orders.

Many admiring biographies of Mr. Jobs – and some not so admiring – have been published in the last several decades. In 2005, John Wiley & Sons released “iCon Steve Jobs” by Jeffrey S. Young, a book that spurred Apple to banish all titles by the publisher from its retail stores.

Michael Moritz gave an account of Apple’s early years in “The Little Kingdom,” originally released in November 1984 and reissued in 2009.