“I felt disturbed reading the brief prologue of ‘iCon,’ with its play-by-play of the crazed reaction of the crowd at the January 2000 Macworld convention when Jobs announced he was taking the title of CEO — the same scene I used in my similarly brief prologue to ‘Second Coming.’ Then I relaxed while the next 135 pages were basically a condensed version of Young’s earlier bio (which drew much of its best material from Moritz’s ‘Little Kingdom’). Then, on Page 138, it began to seem as if Young had reached the end of his previous book — and had begun to condense my book. That page tells the anecdote of Jobs’ blind date with Diane Keaton, then describes his longtime girlfriend, Tina Redse, and their steamy relationship — and it all seems to come right from my book. Six pages later, ‘iCon’ cribs my narrative of Jobs’ first meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was head of animation at Disney at the time,” Alan Deutschman, author of “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” writes for The San Francicso Chronicle.
“The next chapter, about the origins and rise of Pixar, reads a lot like my chapter on the same topic, which was the best part of my book. It’s irritating to see detailed descriptions of key characters and entire narrative scenes — sometimes at climactic points in the story — re-created with just enough extraneous ornamentation and language changes to avoid being outright rip-offs,” Deutschman writes.
Full review here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Banned in Apple Retail Stores, ‘iCon’ unauthorized Steve Jobs bio doubles initial printing run – May 01, 2005
Publisher says Apple removed all its books from Apple stores due to upcoming Steve Jobs bio – April 26, 2005
Ouch.
Can anyone say ‘plagiarism’? I thought you could.
I appreciate the break down of the two books. I’m relieved that I haven’t read any of the bios on Steve, but I did enjoy “Pirates of Silicon” valley. When can we get that on DVD?
: )
Maybe that’s why Steve pulled them off the shelves…
Left rear tire: according to Amazon, it’s out on DVD August 30th. They’re taking pre-orders.
“Maybe that’s why Steve pulled them off the shelves…”
Or not…
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an example on plagiarism (or plagiarizing fandango):
Who can say ‘plagirism’? I bet you can.
and so it goes…
Jobs was right to banish all books by the publisher from Apple stores.
They should not be in the game of reproducing others’ work. I hope they are suffering.
Even Thurrot thought he’d read it all before.. http://www.internet-nexus.com/
Is Thurrot lurking here as “Macaday” and posting links to his own site? Don’t visit that troll’s site. He thrives off hits!
I haven’t read either book, so I cannot comment on the exact similarities. However, do you think he’s going to come out and go “Hey, this book is awesome, you should buy it instead of my book!” Obviously it is in his interest to bash the other guy’s book and make accusations. The things he cites as examples don’t wash with me. I mean, they are both biographies of the same guy in the same time period. Do you think they’re not going to be covering basically the same events. And they are both in chronogical order, yet somehow he thinks that the placement of the particular items in the book is a rip-off. Yet he didn’t magically make them up, that’s the order in which they happened. Even Deutschman seems to acknowledge that the writing is different than his own, so basically his complaint is that another guy who wrote a book on the same exact topic and time period included the same info as he did. What did he think was going to happen?
Thurrott said it blew.. and I actually believe him. I mean, there are other SJ books out there, and just because you’re a shill for MS doesn’t mean you can’t point out which one sucks the least.
I mean, if you love Windows, you’ve gotta like SJ at least a little…it’s like.. his grandchild…