Walter Isaacson on Crowdsourcing His New Book

Several weeks ago, Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography Steve Jobs, quietly began an experiment: He posted a passage from his new book, about the origins of the personal-computing age, on the website LiveJournal and asked for feedback. Not much happened, so he turned to Scribd, then to Medium, the buzzy writing website created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. One post on Medium was read by about 18,000 people and inspired about 125 comments, plus dozens of e-mails and a few full articles exploring some aspect of Isaacson’s subject matter, the author said in an interview on Saturday.

The people responding have ranged from folk Isaacson doesn’t know of to some of his primary subjects. Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, who figured prominently in Silicon Valley circles in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote a lengthy response without specific prompting from Isaacson, who then posted it to Medium as a separate post.