FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Julia Prosser, Simon & Schuster, 212-698-7529, julia.prosser@simonandschuster.com

New York, N.Y., April 7, 2014—Simon & Schuster announced today that it will publish a new book by Walter Isaacson entitled, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, in October 7, 2014. World English rights were acquired by Alice Mayhew, Vice President and Editorial Director of Simon & Schuster, from Amanda Urban at ICM Partners.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling biographer of creative geniuses such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. His previous book, Steve Jobs, was the bestselling nonfiction book of 2011, and won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, awarded by UCLA. With The Innovators, he returns to form with a history where creativity and science and technology intersect.

Isaacson writes, “The computer and the internet are among the most important innovations of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It’s also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.”

Isaacson’s narrative shows how ideas and imagination actually got converted into the inventions that transformed our era. It focuses on the dozen or so most significant breakthroughs and the people who made them: the computer, programming, the transistor, the microchip, video games, the internet, the personal computer, software, the web. The book opens with Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer algorithm, and continues through the work of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

“The Innovators is a pivotal book,” says Alice Mayhew, Isaacson’s long-time editor. “It describes the birth of a new universe the way Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation described the discovery of modern biology, the way Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine described the birth of a computer, and the way Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb described the creation of a nuclear weapon. Isaacson celebrates community and creativity, two gifts we sometimes find hard to come by, and any human being’s superiority over any machine he might invent. That’s the real music.”

The Innovators will be available in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats at publication. It will be published by Simon & Schuster and its subsidiaries: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, and the international companies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India.

Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and daughter.

Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corporation, is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic, and audio formats. Its divisions include Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.