Update 10:05 a.m.: With increased interest publisher Simon & Schuster has again pushed up the release date to October 24, reports Crain's New York Business.
In light of Steve Jobs's death, interest in his biogra
phy Steve Jobs has understandably skyrocketed. The book by Walter Isaacson, head of the Aspen Institute (which together with The Atlantic, co-hosts the annual Aspen Ideas Festival), was based on over 40 interviews with the Apple founder over 100 conversations with friends, family members, colleagues and competitors and had Jobs's full cooperation. Isaacson continued his conversations with Jobs right up to deadline, conducting his final interview four weeks ago, reports Speakeasy. "Jobs indicated at that time that he knew he was going to die soon. The scene will appear at the end of the book." As Jobs stepped out of the limelight, interest piqued in the book due out November 21--pushed up from a Spring 2012 release date--but anticipation has mounted in the last 12 hours.
Before news of Jobs passing came out, the biography ranked 384th on Amazon.com, reported Media Decoder. It currently stands at No. 1 with 521 Facebook likes. The book, originally 448 pages now lists as 656. Simon & Schuster had announced an enhanced e-version with 200 more pages of his life, as we reported, but on Am
azon.com it looks like the hardcover version will contain those extra pages of his life, whereas Amazon lists its Kindle version at the original 448. Isaacson has said that those extra words include Jobs resignation announcement and, as Speakeasy reports, his confrontation with death.
For those who can't wait for the November release date, Time magazine rushed a special Steve Jobs commemorative issue. It has 21 pages on Jobs, including an essay by Isaacson, which tells how the project came about.
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In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from him. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted, instead, to take a walk so we could talk.
That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.
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Isaacson might also get a movie deal out of it, speculates Deadline's Nikki Finke. "Given the TV and movie industry’s past and present penchant for making entertainment out of people’s lives, it won’t be long before the book is made into a film."
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