Steve Jobs Biography Release Date Moved to October, Time Magazine Special On the Way

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Steve Jobs’ official biography was supposed to be released in November but following yesterday unfortunate event the launch date has been moved up to October 24. Written by Walter Isaascson, the book can be pre-ordered via iTunes and Amazon, with the later offering it both in paper and Kindle versions.

As previously reported, the book will cover the August 24 resignation of Jobs as CEO of the company. Isaacson has also written an essay for Time Magazine. The publication has decided to stop the presses on its current edition and release a special edition dedicated to Steve Jobs.

Apple’s former leader will be on the cover of the magazine for the seventh time. On top of Isaacson’s essay, Time Magazine will also feature a photo essay by Diana Walker and a retrospective of the company written by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman.

In what follows you can read a preview of Isaacson’s six-page essay, as reported by Forbes:

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.

But I later realized that he had called me just before he was going to be operated on for cancer for the first time. As I watched him battle that disease, with an awesome intensity combined with an astonishing emotional romanticism, I came to find him deeply compelling, and I realized how much his personality was ingrained in the products he created. His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business, so I decided to try to write his tale as a case study in creativity.

Apparently the author of the biography knew more than a month ago that the inevitable end was near. Isaacson interviewed him right before and right after his resignation as CEO. Here’s another excerpt for the upcoming special feature on Time Magazine, via 9 to 5 Mac that details one of these interviews:

A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. We talked about his childhood, and he gave me some pictures of his father and family to use in my biography. As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Have you already pre-ordered your copy of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson?