Becoming Steve Jobs, a new book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli about Jobs’ life, comes out on March 24th and is available to download both in digital and print. As part of a strong marketing push by Apple in the run up to the book’s release, iBooks is offering an exclusive free sample of the prologue and first chapter that you can download right now. (Update: It’s unclear what countries the sample is being offered in — readers are reporting it showing it for some but not universally.)
Apple has been heavily promoting the book in the last few days, on its iBooks Twitter account as well as through iTunes marketing emails. iBooks describes it as the ‘only book about Steve recommended by the people who knew him best’. For comparison, in one of the chapters, Tim Cook describes the Isaacson biography as a tremendous disservice.
From the sample, the prologue features Schlender describing his first ever interview with Steve Jobs, when Jobs was marketing his new venture at NeXT, and an introduction to how his relationship developed. The first chapter opens with a description of how Jobs reacted at a meeting for the Seva foundation. The full book features seventeen chapters. Interestingly, the introduction explains that the writing of the book is the work of two people, the book uses ‘I’ throughout the narrative as much of the book revolves around Schlender’s 25 year experience with Jobs.
https://twitter.com/ghrobson/status/579643446471852032
Best portrayal is about to be released – Becoming Steve Jobs (book). Well done and first to get it right.
— Eddy Cue (@cue) March 16, 2015
You can pre-order Becoming Steve Jobs now, with release on the 24th (iBooks, Amazon).
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I bought this book last week.
http://www.siampod.com/2015/03/18/becoming-steve-jobs-book-now-available-in-thailand/
I know a lot of people didn’t like the Isaacson book and think that ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ will be better (I thought it was pretty good and felt fair and was a good idea to have a more neutral person write his life instead of having a journalist who was close to him). Was there information that was wrong in the Isaacson book? Or is it that the Apple people didn’t like the fact that it showed so many examples of the terrible things Steve Jobs did (along side all of his successes) and wanted something more sympathetic — perhaps promoting Jobs as more of a hero? I personally don’t think it has to be either villain or hero, but that Jobs was complicated — he was BOTH tyrannical jerk and compassionate friend inside the same body. Therefore, I can both revere his accomplishments while denouncing some of his awful flaws.
The problem with the Isaacson book was that broke very little new ground. Anyone who paid any attention at all to Steve’s life already knew 99% of what was in the book.
Available in New Zealand Store
Apple is inadvertently damaging the credibility of this book by promoting it so heavily. Sure, there were always going to be critics who called the book a hagiography…but all these Apple testimonials can only lead to it being written off as the company-sanctioned officially sanitized corporate biography. If this book is any good, casting it in that light does it no favors and will lead to more people dismissing it sight unseen. They should have kept quiet about the book until after publication.
the isaacson book was a steve jobs approved book. there should not be a discussion, which book is “better”.
To me Steve Jobs was a master of misdirection when he wanted to be. That is the only thing that really explains the Issacson book. It was a book about Jobs that revealed nothing new about him or Apple and my guess is that’s exactly what he wanted.
like anybody else would do, i guess…
I am in the US. While I do see the advertisement for the free sample, after clicking on it the only option is a $12.99 pre order.
Same here
I don’t see a way to get a free sample. There’s only a pre-order. I don’t know how in the hell anyone is getting a free sample.
i do not want to be like steve jobs , I wants to be my Self .
I’m also unable to get the sample from the iBooks store
Simply because Jobs requested the author, doesn’t mean the author would necessarily do the best job.
For myself, the Isaacson book was a total rehash of the previously released “iCon” and on that basis it didn’t really qualify as something Isaacson produced. With the benefit of having access to Jobs, Isaacson’s crimping from “iCon” was somewhat obscured, but the similarities are otherwise clear.
Lastly, Isaacson has been camping on the Jobs association (and profiting from it) for too long since the book’s release. It’s one thing for an author to have the privilege of associating directly with Jobs to produce a guaranteed instant hit, but it’s another thing altogether to ride that wave purely for profit.
The whole fiasco shows Isaacson in a much worse light than it does Jobs.
As for this new book, I didn’t know Apple was in the business of book reviews, but individual people have the right to express their thoughts on a book so closely connected to a dear friend or member of their family. People can whatever they like. It’s the final product that counts.
I think the Isaacson book was okay, but Isaacson himself didn’t really understand the man he was dealing with. The part at the end, as Jobs’ end approaches, he goes to Bill Gates for his understanding. Not saying that Gates didn’t know him, but he certainly didn’t understand what made him tick, and he totally disagreed with the business method; and for a long time, it seems that Gates was right. Isaac recounted a lot of things about Jobs’ earlier, selfish and crazy early life and then seemed to think he had never evolved much. So in a strange way, it was too adulatory of the enfant terrible Jobs, and didn’t seem to spot the evolution in the guy. He did get some details from his wife, but the people who probably spent more of his time on this earth were the guys he chose to work with. I’m thinking this will be a much broader and sympathetic treatment of what he did during the parts of his life that were most important to him: the company he built. Certainly the inner circle at Apple fully cooperated, and what I’m hearing is, they genuinely loved the guy and still run the company in much the same way — except, they seem to be opening it up to some degree.
In the Netherlands the book is listed twice if you search on ‘becoming steve jobs’ in iBooks Store:
one has chapter 1 (+prologue) as the sample, the other has chapter 13 as the sample.