The fake advice book on the bestseller list in Taiwan may be — wait for it — the clone of an earlier fake book first released in China.
Called “Steve Paul Jobs’s Eleven Pieces of Advice for Young People Today,” and written by a certain John Cage, as we noted it’s a best seller in Taiwan.
Indefatigable Fake Steve Spotter Dan Bloom tells us that it turns out that book is just a rip-off of an earlier fake.
Max Epstejn discovered the ruse:
This reporter recently purchased a copy of the book in Complex Chinese characters in a bookstore in Taipei and discovered via the “publication notes page” that the counterfeit book — which was never written by Steven Paul Jobs or John Cage and merely took past speeches by Jobs and turned the excerpts into eleven lessons for teenagers in China — that the book was originally published in Communist China last year first in Simplified Chinese characters…
The publisher in Taipei still maintains that his book was legit and that all copyright protections were in order.
Reuters reports the police are now investigating the case.
The head spins.
Hat tip Dan Bloom
