Thursday, August 18, 2011

Steve Job's bio brought forward to November


A peek at Steve Jobs' book jacket - front, back and spine

August 16, 2011: CNN MOney
The look of Walter Isaacson's bio will be as spare and restrained as any Apple product
 Copyright Simon & Schuster
"The cover," writes Isaacson in private e-mail, "is the Albert Watson portrait taken for Fortune in 2009. The back is a Norman Seeff portrait of him in the lotus position holding the original Macintosh, which ran in Rolling Stone in January 1984. The title font is Helvetica. It will look as you see it, with no words on the back cover."
He's talking, of course, about Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, the first book about the life of Apple's (AAPL) cofounder written with Jobs' support and cooperation (see The man who won Steve Jobs' trust). It was back in the news Monday when new listings on Amazon (AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (BKS) revealed that the pubdate had been moved up to Nov. 21, 2011, from March 6, 2012 . The change sparked speculation that the new schedule might somehow be related to a decline in Jobs' health.
"It's actually not related to any decline," writes Isaacson. "I turned most of the book in this past June. It's now all done and edited. The March 2012 date (or whatever date it was) was never a deeply-considered pubdate. Like the original cover design, it came about because the publisher wanted to put something in the database last spring."
Below: The publishers' description of the book and the author bio as it appears on the B&N website. A description of the book that included a quote has been replaced with the one you see below. You can read the longer one here. The author's bio leaves out the fact that Isaacson and Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' wife, both sit on the board of Teach for America.

The book:
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
More at CNN Money.

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