I GOT THREE COPIES of Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography and along with Neville Hobson I am watching how people share passages from this excellent book.
I didn't expect to get two hardcover books and one Kindle edition but I failed to empty a wishlist and just like that, people dropped me copies. I put the two 600-page tomes on the shelves of the LIT-Clonmel library where they should get ambitious circulation because extracts from the book feature in three different creative multimedia final exams this year. The electronic version is illuminating because of the fascinating nature of shared passages. When the book magically arrived on my Kindle, the most-read passage concerned religion after the book's first week on sale. In that passage, Jobs says, "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."
But in subsequent weeks, the most-highlighted passage changed.
Two weeks after the book's release, it appears that people interested in innovation started reading its electronic version because "the annals of innovation" enjoyed the status of being the "most highlighted". The segment is highlighted in an accurate description of how Jobs discovered the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. "Ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important." Perhaps a lot of innovators find this paragraph worthy of highlighting and sharing.
Three weeks after the launch of the Jobs biography, the marketers and business consultants have changed the status of the most-highlighted passages. The first passage to exceed more than 200 shared highlights is a Jobs maxim. "Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume you are."
I'm thumbing through the most-highlighted passages at the moment, trying to determine the highlights that deserve to form part of the model answers to final examinations in Media Writing, Public Relations and Emerging Technology. I plan to leak my ideas on to Audioboo as part of the Audiomo11 series.
Walter Isaacson -- Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography ISBN 978-1451648539
