In just a few days, the authorized tell-all biography of Steve Jobs has, unsurprisingly, become the best-selling book on the market and is already nearing the list of top books of 2011.
Not that anyone needed to be told these declarations, but now we have numbers to prove it.
In its first week, the biography, written by Walter Isaacson, sold 379,000 copies according to Bookscan US. That made it the best-selling book for the week, easily outpacing the new John Grisham novel The Litigators by more than three-to-one.
The large sales numbers are certainly no surprise. There was already huge interest surrounding the book as soon as it was announced. A notoriously private man, Steve rarely offered anyone a look into his personal life, but when approached by Isaacson, a then-ailing Jobs accepted that it might be his last chance to have his story told the way he wanted it to be told.
When Jobs passed away, interest in the book understandably spiked, so much so that it was pushed up ahead of its originally scheduled release date.
What is unknown is how many copies of the hardcover book were sold compared to digital sales. Jobs was of course a champion of digital content so it would be interesting to see exactly how many people chose to read his life’s story on a digital format.
The book is listed as the #1 title on both Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks platform.
