Jobs Agrees to Official Biography

He's secretive, mysterious and even sometimes downright crabby. But he apparently plans to open up his life to a biographer. Apple’s CEO-on-Hiatus, Steve Jobs, has agreed to cooperate with an official biography of his life, to be written by author and biographer Walter Isaacson. Called “iSteve: The Book of Jobs,”it is scheduled to be published in early 2012 by Simon & Schuster, according to ABC News.

Isaacson has reportedly been working on the book since 2009, using interviews with Jobs, members of his family, colleagues at Apple and competitors.

There have been biographies written about Jobs before, but none with his sanction. In 2005, Jobs banished the works of publisher John Wiley & Sons from the Apple store after the publisher released a book called “iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.”  It was written by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon. (Note to writers...using the lower-case “i” in front of anything to do with Apple is a cutesy gimmick that has truly jumped the shark.)

That book was also criticized heavily at the time of its publication by writer Alan Deutschman due to the similarity of the book's content to his own unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs called “The Second Coming of SteveJobs.” (Jobs wasn't a fan of that one, either.)

The writer of the sanctioned bio, Walter Isaacson, is a former executive at CNN and Time magazine. He has written popular books about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. He is currently the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a “nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute” in Washington, D.C.

“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world's greatest innovators,” said Jonathan Karp, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius.”