Steve Jobs Biography Best Seller Even Before Early Release

The cover of "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson, to be published later this month by Simon & Schuster. Photo by CNN

The official Steve Jobs biography will be released a month earlier than planned after the Apple co-founder lost his long and very public battle against cancer and died on Wednesday.

The authorised biography of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, will hit the market on 24 October. Publishing house Simon & Schuster had originally planned to release it on 21 November.

The book, titled simply, "Steve Jobs," rocketed from 437 to No. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list -- a spike of 43,000% -- in the hours after Jobs' death, thanks to pre-orders. It was No. 3 Thursday on Barnes & Noble's website, and also topped the list of bestselling books in Apple's own iTunes store.

In its blurb for the book, Simon & Schuster promises "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."

The book is based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues.

Simon & Schuster claims that although Jobs cooperated with the book, he asked for no control.

"Although Jobs co-operated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against."

"Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership and values."

Isaacson has told how Jobs, in pain and too weak to climb stairs a few weeks before his death, wanted his children to understand why he wasn't always there for them. "I wanted my kids to know me," Isaacson quoted Jobs as saying in their final interview at Jobs' home in Palo Alto, California. "I wasn't always there for them and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did."

Isaacson said he visited Jobs for the last time a few weeks ago and found him curled up in some pain in a downstairs bedroom. Jobs had moved there because he was too weak to go up and down stairs "but his mind was still sharp and his humour vibrant", Isaacson writes in an essay that will be published in Time magazine's 17 October edition.

Jobs died on Wednesday at the age of 56 after suffering a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

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