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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Books Today in Book Announcements: Egomaniacal Visionaries Edition

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:29 PM

Egomaniacal Visionary # 1:

Screen_shot_2010-02-16_at_11.59.53_AM.png

Steve Jobs is working on an authorized biography with Walter Isaacson, who wrote a very good biography of Benjamin Franklin. But Jobs is a really prickly subject:

It's a curious move on a number of levels. Jobs has never cooperated with anyone who's written a book about him, evidently going so far as to compel Apple stores to stop stocking other books from publishers who sell those unauthorized tomes...So the idea he would suddenly turn candid, and let Isaacson into every private aspect of his inner life, is at best unrealistic and at worst ludicrous.

Egomaniacal Visionary # 2:

James Cameron is going to write an Avatar novel.

Producer Jon Landau told MTV News: "Jim is going to write a novel himself ... Not a novelization—and there is a distinction. A novelization basically retells the story of the movie. Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things."

I have to say, if this is based on the "scriptment" that I wrote about on Slog in December, this could be good. If his novel-writing skills are as poor as I suspect they might be, though, I hope that Cameron has the good sense to bring on a sci-fi writer to do the heavy lifting.

Comments (9) RSS

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Look, I don't want to start any blasphemous rumors, but maybe Jobs wants to get his story down before he kicks the bucket.

Posted by prince on February 16, 2010 at 1:56 PM

Did Jobs not have a liver transplant last year? And pancreatic cancer before that?

Yeah, it's so weird that he would suddenly just out of the blue cooperate with a biographer. Uncanny. I wonder what it means?

Posted by elenchos on February 16, 2010 at 2:00 PM

maybe he expects to find god laughing?

Posted by Beetlecat on February 16, 2010 at 2:19 PM

Jobs is an interesting guy, but I'm skeptical anything truly revealing would come from him personally. For example, how'd he get that kidney so fast?

Posted by Dougsf on February 16, 2010 at 2:28 PM

But... the story was the worst thing about Avatar!

Posted by Geocrackr on February 16, 2010 at 2:28 PM

Toting around my Win7 ASUS netbook (with Pinetrail Atom CPU, 11 hours battery) and hooked up with Clear wimax, I can't see why Apple has any hope of surviving.

Example, I was just tapped into work while sitting on the banks of the Green River, across from the golf course.

A $330 10" computer, beating out every ipad,iphone and itablet ever conceived.

ASUS eee with Windows 7 is the ultimate portable thang.

Posted by Pinetrail For Life on February 16, 2010 at 2:53 PM

Orson Scott Card did the novelization for The Abyss and gave the main characters back stories and depth the script couldn't.

I wonder if Cameron secretly hated that the book turned out to be much much better then the movie...

Posted by Blackie on February 16, 2010 at 3:54 PM

Avatar was OK. If it gets more people thinking that destroying humanity's future for the sake of short term corporate profits is a bad thing, I guess I'm for it. As a piece of entertainment, it was OK.

Posted by Toasterhedgehog on February 16, 2010 at 6:31 PM