You Can't Con all of the Icons All of the Time
Bravo to Alan Deutschman of Fast Company on his Icon book review. According to Alan, since Jobs won't cooperate with any biographer after Michael Moritz's successful book "The Little Kingdom" in the 1980's, "Jobs' freeze-out gives two options to would-be biographers: Either they can succeed at a bit of investigative reporting, or they can plunder the work of those who have. Unfortunately, the authors of "iCon" are guilty mostly of the latter." He then proceeds to rip the book apart, finding rehashes of his and Moritz's work. "I felt disturbed reading the brief prologue of "iCon," with its play-by- play of the crazed reaction of the crowd at the January 2000 Macworld convention when Jobs announced he was taking the title of CEO -- the same scene I used in my similarly brief prologue to "Second Coming." Then I relaxed while the next 135 pages were basically a condensed version of Young's earlier bio (which drew much of its best material from Moritz's "Little Kingdom"). Then, on Page 138, it began to seem as if Young had reached the end of his previous book -- and had begun to condense my book."
There is nothing more annoying than doing the hard work in original reporting / research, only to find someone rips it out of your book without even giving credit, or worse yet, distorts what you wrote so that it is completely wrong. I know - I had the same thing happen to me. I co-wrote a kernel design book, Operating System Source Code Secrets Volume 1: The Basic Kernel (see Jolix for more information) describing the design, implementation and internals of 386BSD and incorporating original work. No one else had ever done this work before in any operating system - we had done the long series of technical articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal on which some of it was based, plus years out of Berkeley with the majority of work. The book was released in 1996 to good reviews, but it was about BSD of course, and focussed entirely on evolving that architecture.
So imagine my surprise when the Chief Architect of Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) in 1998 came to my office with a Linux kernel book of about the same thickness. He was in charge of kernel issues with Linux and OPS. Since we had done kernel architecture and design, he asked me to assist him with understanding why the book discussed a major architectural mechanism in Linux when he couldn't find any corresponding system code supporting it in the release. Much to my surprise, it was almost word-for-word ripped from my book. Worse yet, it was entirely misleading - Linux had a fundamentally different architectural design and could never function in this manner!
We pulled my book out, and began to compare it in sections and chapters. Same as what Alan outlined happened to him in reviewing Icon, but more egregious in a sense, since what they talked about had fundamental differences with the OS they were documenting - it wasn't Linux either. So they ripped off their customer and mine by basically changing 386BSD to "Linux", and sold it as an original design work. Lovely, huh?
Like Alan, I've spent a lot of years building a reputation for original work, and I take a great deal of pride in my writings. Every one of my papers, articles, and books is my slant - not someone else's regurgitated offal. It's a privilege to write, and I enjoy it. And I also credit others - it's only professional and fair. Finally, and most importantly, in technical work lies and misstatements can have real consequences, from failed products and lost investments to (in the case of critical care and systems) genuine safety concerns. Technical works must be real, verifiable, and honest.
There has been a trend towards whole-cloth inventions of "author's platforms" and books with no regard for credibility and authority as an easy way for publishers to produce books without investing in real authority. I find this most disturbing. Heritage must matter, else nothing is reliable. You wouldn't want a fake doctor operating on you? Why would you want to buy a book from a fake author?