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Apple hasn’t officially commented yet, but according to The New York Times, Steve Jobs may finally cooperate on an authorized biography.

Other biographers have attempted to tell Mr. Jobs’s life story without his express involvement or even consent, prompting him to respond by yanking books by the same publishers from Apple stores. Now two sources have confirmed to the Times that former Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson will get Jobs’s cooperation in producing an authorized biography of the Apple CEO.

Isaacson is the author of two other best-selling biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. The book is still early in the planning stages, but is set to cover the life of the technology giant from his childhood to his career at Apple.

Would you be interested in reading about the life of Steve Jobs?

[img credit: acaben]

Tags: apple, biography, books, steve jobs

Apple said to be using FairPlay DRM for iBookstore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Cunningham is the CEO of Polar Unlimited, a digital marketing agency.

In his book — Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? — Seth Godin poses a challenge: Take your gift, whatever it is, and use it to change the world.

In the tradition of his previous books, Godin has not settled for a standard how-to, but has written a book that will push and prod you into seeing things differently.   I had the chance to interview Mr. Godin about his book and the concept of the linchpin.

The audio from the interview is below and the full text follows.

What is a Linchpin?

As Godin says, “a linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.”

For much of our lives, we have been trained to be the opposite of a linchpin — an interchangeable part in an industrial machine. Even before the global recession, it often took a career of job hopping to get ahead. In today’s world, companies and customers will show their loyalty only to those who are indispensable. This arrangement, Godin explains, leverages talent and creativity more than it rewards obedience.

However, we are hardwired to avoid this arrangement like the plague.  Our “lizard” brain is what prevents us from becoming a Linchpin, and it orchestrates what Godin calls the “resistance.” The resistance is what prevents us from doing what we say we will do. It prevents us from getting that project completed, those phone calls done, and from stepping outside of our comfort zones. Our lizard brain wants us to remain safe, and at the earliest sign of danger, gives us all sorts of reasons why we can’t accomplish what we set out to do. For instance, it will tell you that people will laugh at your ideas if you hit publish on that blog post, and that you should probably rework that last paragraph to be a little less confrontational. Godin tells the story of a software engineer at Apple who was reluctant to finish a piece of code he had been holding on to because “it wasn’t quite ready,” to which Steve Jobs replied, “artists ship.” So, the only real way to prevent your lizard brain from taking over your life is to complete things even when it feels uncomfortable.

What is clear from Godin’s book is that the world has changed, and you are at the right place at the right time to make a huge difference in your organization and in your life.  Reading this book just might be the kickstart you need to become a linchpin yourself.  I hope you’ll take on that challenge.

Interview with Seth Godin

Steve Cunningham: We’re here with Seth Godin, the author of Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Thanks for being here, Seth.

Seth Godin: Well, thanks for taking the time, Steve. I appreciate it.

Steve Cunningham: No problem. So, let’s start with the obvious question. What’s a linchpin?

Seth Godin: A linchpin is a little piece of a vehicle or device that you can’t live without. It has a very high utility to size ratio. In the terms of my book, a linchpin represents a fundamental shift in the way our economy works. Our economy was built for a hundred years to train people to fit in and be compliant and be productive cogs in a giant machine. And what has shifted just in the last five or ten years, is that those people are not rewarded any more.  Those people are outsourced and mistreated and discarded. And instead the people who are accruing the value and doing the work that we’re proud of are what I call linchpins — the people we can’t live without.

Steve Cunningham: This book has a much more, I’d say personal tone to it than your previous books. It seems to be written directly to the person who’s reading it rather than about an idea. Why write this book right now?

Seth Godin: Well, you know, I get a lot of e-mail everyday — a couple hundred letters — and I saw in the last year or so the tone of it changing. What was happening is, you know, it’s fun to talk about strategy. It’s fun to talk about organizational concepts. But what I discovered that made me quite angry is that a large number of people had been brainwashed and abused, and tricked, and found themselves on a dead end because they had believed something about the system that just wasn’t true.  And I felt like I had this moment in time where I could speak up and talk about this shift, and try, maybe just for 5 or 10% of the people who read the book, to push people to make a choice. And that’s all the book is about, is making a choice to stand out as opposed to fit in. Because what I’m seeing everywhere I look is that the people who are making that choice, not only are they more rewarded, but they’re happier.

Steve Cunningham: A little bit further in the book you talk about the resistance and why it is so hard for us to ship. James Cameron seems to be able to turn off all those distractions and take 10 years and create what the market is calling a masterpiece. Why is there so much resistance for us as everyday people working on everyday things to actually become a linchpin?

Seth Godin: Well, we evolved to want to fit in like most species. You don’t have a long profitable life by standing up and yelling when the saber tooth tigers are around or by offending the chief of the village. And thus our lizard brain, which is at your brain stem the top of your spine — the original brain, the brain that a chicken has — is speaking up on our behalf all the time. Lizard brain is responsible for fear and revenge and anger and sex and reproduction and survival. Well that leads to what Steve Pressfield calls the resistance. The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head that says, “Well don’t do that you’ll get in trouble. Don’t do that, they’ll laugh at you. Don’t do that, it won’t work.”

This resistance get worse when we go to a committee meeting. This resistance gets worse when we’re getting close to a deadline.  It’s the resistance that makes Dell Computer, Dell Computer, but, it’s fighting the resistance that makes Apple Computer, Apple Computer. That every single time you are inclined to sand off a rough edge, what you’re doing is making yourself more average. And the problem with average is that other people are better at being average than you are. And other people are cheaper at being average that you are. And thus, there is little chance for your blog to build a following, or your tweets to get retweeted, or your product to get passed on if it’s average. Because who needs more average? We’ve got plenty of that.

And thus, what James Cameron has figured out is he doesn’t need to dig ditches for a living. He doesn’t need to be stronger than other people for a living.  He doesn’t need to put on more hours as a telemarketer to make a living. All he needs to do is fight the resistance. That every time someone says, “Well why don’t we just make this part a little more average. If he can just stand up and say no I’m going to make it exceptional — even if it’s not better, just exceptional — that’s what he does for a living. That’s his job. And what I am challenging people to do is understand that that’s a pretty good job. And it’s one that almost anyone is capable of doing.

Steve Cunningham: Let’s get personal for a second. We talked about the resistance taking over our lives at some point. So did the resistance take over your life, at some point? And if it did, what did you do about it?

Seth Godin: Oh, every single day I fight the resistance. You know, the time I was probably defeated the most visibly was when I was building my first Internet company, and I was in the right place at the right time, with the right resources, and we could have built it to something quite large. Once I hit 72 employees, I couldn’t do it anymore. The resistance, the voice in my head said, “You know what, you have no business building a company with 200, or 400, or 1,000 people in it, and that’s when we made the decision to hook up with Yahoo.  I was pleased that I was honest enough with myself that I wasn’t going to be able to overcome that one, but disappointed that I let that voice in my head rule the decisions that I was making. On a more prosaic note, every single day when I write a blog post, every single day when I decide what I’m going to do next, there’s a very loud voice in the back of my head that says, “You know, maybe you’re going to blow it with this one. Maybe you’re going too far. Why don’t you just take it easy? And that conversation, as I was talking about with James Cameron, that conversation’s what I do for a living.

I can’t listen inside your head Steve, but I’m imagining lots of people have that conversation.  And I guess if there’s a difference between me and them, at least in terms of my career, it’s that I don’t listen to resistance. Instead I seduce it, or I trick it, or I ignore it, or I fight it different ways everyday. But I don’t let it beat me.

Steve Cunningham: Shifting on to the last topic now — and this is one that you’ve not gotten in trouble for, but people have spoken out about before — [is that] is you don’t give a map. You don’t tell people, “Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you become a linchpin.” Why is it so hard to create a map to become an artist?

Seth Godin: The minute there’s a map there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity. There’s a village in China called Dafen… By one estimate, a third of all the oil paintings in the world are painted in this village in China. And what happens is as soon as the sun rises hundreds of thousands of people run outside, set up their easels, and paint as fast as they can until sunset. That’s what they do for a living. No one would claim that these people are artists. They are painters. They are people who put oil paint on canvas. They have a manual. They have a map.

If I told you, step-by-step, what to do to become indispensable, then anyone could do it. And if anyone could do it, it wouldn’t be worth very much. Scarcity creates value. And, this is going to frustrate people, but the emotional labor of work, today — the thing that makes you worth $50,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 a year — is that you can navigate the world without a map. People who need a map, are going to get paid less and less and work harder and harder every day, because there’s plenty of those people, and I can find them with a click of the mouse. Challenge — the only thing I’m selling in this book — is the decision that you will now live without a map, that you will be less obedient, not more obedient; less compliant, not more compliant; and that ultimately, you will do work that matters. And, if I achieve that, with even a hundred people it will be worth the effort.

Steve Cunningham: Excellent. So we’re at the end of the interview here. What is the one thing you want anybody who listens to this interview or reads the book to do.

Seth Godin: Well, I’m hoping that if you get that far, you’ve already made some sort of the change that you need to make a difference. So what I would like you to do is be generous and teach somebody else this idea. Teach somebody else, maybe a kid, maybe a peer, maybe a boss, about the power of doing work that people talk about.

Steve Cunningham: Thank you so much for being here, Seth. If you are listening to this, you have to go out and get this book. It’s a fantastic book, and I for one will be playing with more cowbell from now on. Thank you very much Seth.

Seth Godin: Thanks Steve, I’ll see ya.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic

- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy

- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration

- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, 3DStock, & sethgodin.com.

Reviews: iStockphoto

Tags: books, business, entrepreneurship, interview, List, Lists, MARKETING, seth godin, small business, social media, strategy, value

Back at CES, we were pretty excited to get our hands on Notion Ink’s far out, Pixel Qi display-boasting reader, Adam. Well, Notion Ink is on the move, and encouraging development for the Tegra-powered little devil is apparently a top priority. The company has unveiled plans to hold an App Competition with one million dollars in prize money for the development of Adam-compatible software. There are no final details about the contest yet, but we think we’ll probably be hearing more about it next week at MWC. Slashgear’s got some interesting renders Notion Ink sent over which give us an idea of what a final production model might look like — and it’s definitely different than the prototype we saw in Las Vegas. The company also told Slashgear that it’s considering having two retail versions of the Adam — but has only said that one might measure 12.9mm thick, and the other 11.6mm thick — so we’re not sure what other differences might be in tow. We’ll let you know when we hear more details about that million dollar prize money, though.

Notion Ink to have competition to encourage development for Adam reader, might release two versions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yinlips is jumping on the e-reader bandwagon with a 6-inch, touchscreen E Ink reader all its own. While we don’t have full specs for this think-looking little guy yet, we do know that it supports a wide array of file formats, supposedly gets around 20 hours of battery life, and that it’s got an FM radio with recording functions. There’s no word on pricing, other specs, or even the official name of this product yet (possibly just ‘E-Book’?), so make your suggestions in the comments, and we’ll try to get word to Yinlips for you.

Yinlips busts out a 6-inch, E Ink-boasting e-reader originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today, Stanford University threw its hat into the ring for Google by expanding an earlier agreement with the search giant and agreeing to digitize the University’s library. The move comes amidst legal controversy over the Google Book Search engine.

As you may know, Google Book Search is currently embroiled in a mess of legal issues that arose a few years back when book authors, book publishers, the Author’s Guild and the Association of American publishers filed a pair of class-action lawsuits claiming that the service encroached on their intellectual property. An agreement was reached in 2008 that comprised these five major points explicating what search should include:

- More access to out-of-print and hard to find books.

- Additional ways to purchase copyrighted books and materials.

- A means for educational institutions such as colleges and universities to subscribe to entire collections.

- Free access from US libraries.

- Compensation and control for authors and publishers.

However, back in August 2009, the issue arose again when Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and multiple library associations joined forces with the non-profit Internet Archive to challenge the Google settlement and push for revisions.

A Settlement in Limbo

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google revised the settlement in November — adding more pricing options and expounding on potential services. A Google spokesperson told the WSJ, “[The settlement] stands to unlock access to millions of books in the U.S. while giving authors and publishers new ways to distribute their work.”

Still, folks remained unsatisfied, and were given the chance to file objections to the document directly to the U.S. District Court of the Southern District Court at the end of last year. The Court has set a fairness hearing for February 18.

Therefore, Stanford’s decision, which makes it a Fully Participating Library according to the University’s website, is a move that shows solidarity with Google on the college’s part. Close to two million of Stanford’s books have already been scanned, and now even more volumes — including those that are rare and hard to find — will be available to the world at large.

University Librarian Michael A. Keller said of the settlement:

“It creates a working partnership among authors, publishers, libraries and Google that will usher in a revolutionary change in access to books on library shelves, even beyond the incredibly powerful vision that Google Books first developed. It’s no longer just about finding books of potential interest; it makes them vastly more readily readable. The agreement also compensates authors and publishers for the use of works that, by virtue of being out of print, would not have earned the rightsholders any income – a novel and, for most authors, a most welcome innovation.”

[img credit: timetrax23]

Reviews: Google

Tags: books, business, Google, money, Stanford