Authorised Steve Jobs biography due out next year

A biography of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs will be published next year. Walter Isaacson will write the book, to be called iSteve: The Book of Jobs, and it will be published by Simon & Schuster, according to a report from ABC.

Isaacson has been researching the biography since 2009, interviewing Jobs, his family and collegues, and Apple competitors.

The writer is president and chief executive of the Aspen Insitute, chairman and chief executive of CNN and managing editor of Time.  

The book will be the first about Jobs, published with his approval, for some time.  In 1984, Mike Moritz wrote The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer, with access to Jobs, but since then the high-profile chief executive has been less willing to co-operate with even the most earnest journalists.

Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon wrote an unauthorised biography called iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, in the 1990s, but Jobs banned all publications from publisher John Wiley & Sons in Apple retail stores.