Steve Jobs Bio becomes Amazon book of the year

Having rocketed to the top of the book charts in October following the death of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs biography has quickly become Amazon’s best-selling book of 2011.

The company predicted the book would become a best-seller back in October, when an Amazon spokeswoman told Reuters:

The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year.

It’s a pretty impressive achievement when you consider that the title has only been available since late October. However, just a month after its debut, the book had already risen to the second spot on Amazon’s chart, and looked destined to be a huge success.

Steve Jobs Biography extremely popular among BitTorrent users

So far Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is a huge hit with over 380,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone in the six days since its October 24 launch.

Not surprisingly, pirated versions of the ebook are also a hit, several sources have scanned the torrent sites and have found that the Jobs bio is  hugely popular, currently there are hundreds of torrents of the bio available from the usual torrent sites. On one popular Torrent site, a bundle of the eBook and audiobook has been seeded more than 1,200 times.

Pirating books is taking off in a big way. Earlier this week, John Wiley and Sons became the first publisher to sue BitTorrent users for pirating its titles. Wiley sued 27 BitTorrent users in federal court in New York on Monday, claiming copyright infringement and seeking damages. Wiley claims the defendants illegally shared copies of its “For Dummies” books. The publisher, one of the largest in the world, joins several major movie studios and music companies in suing BitTorrent users.

Jobs authorized bio so his kids would get to know him better.

In an essay for Time magazine’s October 17th issue, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson says the reason Jobs agreed to a biography was because he wanted his kids to know him better.

“I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” Jobs told Isaacson at their final meeting, which he said was “a few weeks ago.”

Walter Isaacson’s biography of notoriously private Jobs, simply titled “Steve Jobs,” has been moved up to an October 24th publishing date. Before the move, the biography was set to be published on November 21, which was another publishing date change from its original March 6, 2012 date. After Jobs’s death on October 5th, the 656-page biography shot up Amazon’s book sales charts and currently holds the #1 (hardcover) and #2 (Kindle) spots on the site.

Authorized Steve Jobs biography due in early 2012

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Timemagazine, has been working on an authorized biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs for some time. Over at Apple 2.0/Fortune, Phil Elmer-Dewitt reports thatiSteve: The Book of Jobs has been completed and will be published in early 2012.

It may be surprising that someone as intensely protective of his privacy as Steve Jobs would authorize anyone to tell his life story. After reading Elmer-Dewitt’s profile of Isaacson, though, it’s a little clearer why Jobs has finally opened up. Isaacson’s résumé is very impressive indeed, as are his biography subjects to date: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and Albert Einstein.

With Isaacson behind the project and Jobs as its subject, iSteve sounds like it should be a fascinating read. For an alternate take on the choice of Isaacson as the official iBiographer, seeMichael Wolff’s piece here.