These are the kinds of issues publishers of electronic textbooks have to address. These are the reasons the barriers to entry are so large. How will Apple route around them — or rise to meet them? Since the publication of Isaacson’s biography, readers have seen Jobs the visionary, Jobs the jerk, Jobs the gleaner of others’ technologies, and Jobs the editor of his own devices. What’s usually missed, and what is so triumphantly on display in his 1996 Wired interview, is Jobs the pessimist. Jobs was brilliant at identifying problems and knowing when there might be a solution Apple might provide — and knowing when the problems were such that there would never be a way out. Nevertheless, he was equally brilliant at knowing when his pessimism had been proven wrong. After all, in 2008, he famously panned Amazon’s Kindle: “The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more.” Now that Amazon is one of Apple’s top competitors, Apple knows that despite its problems, publishing and education are still worth taking seriously.