The Steve Jobs Archive released its first book Tuesday, Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words. It’s a memoir of sorts because almost everything in it comes directly from Jobs, from major speeches and interviews to emails he sent to himself. It covers the Apple co-founder’s life from a young age until he passed away in 2011.
The new book includes never-before-seen content, the archive said, and it’s free from multiple sources.
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words
You can get the new book on Apple Books or view it as a “custom web experience” designed by LoveFrom, the firm Jony Ive founded upon leaving Apple. Or you can download a version suitable for any compatible e-reader, the Steve Jobs Archive said.
Here’s how the organization describes the new Steve Jobs book (and how to get it) in its email to subscribers:
We are delighted to share our first book! Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails—including material never seen before by the public—that reveals how he approached his life and work.
The book is now available and free to read as a custom web experience designed by LoveFrom, via Apple Books, and from participating libraries via our partners at Libby. You can also download the file to view on any compatible e-reader.
We put a lot of love into making this—so that you can make it your own. Take notes. Add bookmarks. Debate its contents. We hope this book inspires in you the passion to create what only you can—and the confidence to share it with the world.
Take a quick look at posthumous Steve Jobs memoir
Photo: Kazuhiro Shiozawa/Flickr CC
For a quick look, just go to the Steve Jobs Archive homepage and click “Read now.” The book will appear on a new page, complete with the cover photo slowly filling in like a Polaroid snapshot.
Hover your cursor over on the left to bring up a table of contents largely in the form of a timeline. You can click on sections or time periods you want to explore.
You can go straight to the introduction from Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Or you can pick a date range. Those sections start with a background history and then go into the relevant piece from Jobs, like emails, quotations and more. Or you can look over the timeline of key events at the end.
Here’s Jobs on meeting Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak after working on a project in a mutual friend’s garage one night:
We ended up talking for hours. I was real impressed with him. I thought he was great. He had a good sense of humor […] and we had a common interest [in electronics] that sort of bound us together even though we were totally different in every other way possible.
We’re sort of like two planets in our own orbits that every so often intersect each other. There’s a bond there that will last as long as we both live.
There’s always ‘One More Thing …’
The timeline at the end of the book runs from 1975 to 2011. But keep scrolling because there is, of course, “One More Thing …” as Jobs so often said when he introduced new Apple products.
In the book, the “one more thing” comes in the form of an extended, seminal quote from Jobs about the importance of realizing you can change life, not just live it. Many folks will recognize it, even if they never read the whole thing.
The quote starts like this, but this is only the beginning of it:
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
Section by section
See all of the new book’s sections below (sorry, you’ll have to go to the e-book itself for links). The preface is actually a printed version of an oral history Jobs recorded for the Smithsonian.
- Introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs
- Preface: Steve on His Childhood and Young Adulthood
- 1976 – 1985 “A lot of people put a lot of love into these products.”
- 1985 – 1996 “You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times.”
- 1996 – 2011 “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”
- Key Events (plus “One More Thing …”)
- Credits
