“Midnight release parties have become common for blockbuster movies, video games, young adult/fantasy fiction and anything else likely to command long lines of loyal nerds. As far as I know, no physical bookstores held Harry Potter-style release parties for Walter Isaacson’s new biography. But we nerds stood in a virtual queue for ‘Steve Jobs‘ just the same,” Tim Carmody reports for Wired.
“A full hour before the official digital release, blogger/investor Dave Pell captured the mood, tweeting with tongue half in cheek: “Aside from big religious holidays, there have probably never been more people reading the same book at the same time.” Preorders had already made the Jobs biography a best-seller for Kindle, iBooks and Nook. Jobs’ death on Oct. 5 saw preorders skyrocket, leading Simon & Schuster to accelerate the publication date,” Carmody reports. “Just think: Not so long ago, Simon & Schuster might have delayed the e-book release by as much as four months after the print release date. Now, an Amazon spokesperson says that the Jobs biography may be Amazon’s bestseller for all of 2011, with Forrester analyst James McQuivey claiming that, given current trends in bestselling books, the Steve Jobs e-book may outperform print for up to six months and account for up to 70% of all sales.”
Carmody reports, “Jobs’ biography may be the first great digital book event, a last hurrah for the universally appealing hardcover, a collective reading experience of Potteresque proportions.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Steve Jobs can now be purchased from Apple’s iBookstore (US$16.99) here: Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward Weber” for the heads up.]