Books for fun

Wired just gave us a fun excerpt from iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business - the unauthorized biography coming on Monday. It is about Jobs telling a story about how he and his family had a dinner discussion regarding whether they would buy an American or a European washing machine. That dinner discussion continued on every night for two weeks, after which everyone felt that they had gone through the subject and could decide to buy European.

Jobs told the story in an interview, explaining how important design is, and how important it is to really understand the functionality in order to be a good designer. "You have to really grok what it's all about."

After the superb marketing trick of Apple throwing out all Wiley & Sons books from their stores, supposedly because the publisher didn’t agree to remove the word “iCon” in the title, I (and probably quite a few more people) immediately pre-ordered the book from Amazon. I can't help thinking that this actually could be yet another really clever conscious marketing trick from Jobs. Given that he would like to, and thinks he could, increase the hype around his person.

Anyway, after reading the excerpt I got so inspired, that I had to order the book’s predecessor by the same co-author: Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward. It's only available second-hand.