Steve Jobs biography on track to be 2011 bestseller
The new biography of deceased Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs may be Amazon.com Inc's top-selling book of 2011, a spokeswoman at the largest Internet retailer said on Monday.
The biography "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson, hit bookstores on Monday but was released earlier than expected on Apple's iBooks online store and Amazon's Kindle late Sunday.
The book is the best-selling book on Amazon.com and is also listed as the top-selling electronic book on the company's Kindle eBook store.
"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.
Turner did not say whether eBook versions of the biography are out-selling physical versions.
However, James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that on average 50 percent of best seller books are digital and in some cases that can go as high as 70 percent.
"It's very likely for the next six months this book will outperform the physical version," he said.
For all of his innovation, Jobs was not the world's best manager, biographer Walter Isaacson said.
Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and then brought a revolution to the mobile market but the inspiring genius is known for his hard edges that have often times alienated colleagues and early investors with his my-way-or-the-highway dictums.
"He's not warm and fuzzy," Isaacson said in an interview with "60 Minutes" on CBS on Sunday. "He was not the world's greatest manager. In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."
"He could be very, very mean to people at times," he added.
Jobs loved to argue but not everyone around him shared that passion, which drove some of his top people away. While his style had yielded breakthrough products, it didn't make for "great management style," Isaacson said.
In one of the more than 40 interviews that Jobs gave the biographer, the technology icon said he felt totally comfortable being brutally honest.
"That's the ante for being in the room. So we're brutally honest with each other and all of them can tell me they think I'm full of s**t, and I can tell anyone I think they're full of s**t," Jobs said. "And we've had some rip-roaring arguments where we're yelling at each other."
(Reporting by Soyoung Kim and Poornima Gupta. Editing by Anshuman Daga and Tim Dobbyn)
