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Authorized Steve Jobs biography due in early 2012

As we reported in February of 2010, Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine, 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 that iSteve: 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.

There's a one-degree-of-separation TUAW connection to Isaacson, as it happens. Our lead editor Mike Rose was in charge of new media at Entertainment Weekly in the mid-1990s when Isaacson was running Time Inc.'s Pathfinder web portal for the company's magazine titles, and they worked together on occasion. Mike says he doubts that Walter will see fit to send him advance galleys of the Jobs biography for old times' sake, but it never hurts to ask.

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, see Michael Wolff's piece here.