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Fake Steve Jobs tells kids: 'Do what you want to do'

Counterfeit iPhones, now bogus biographies

The Chinese have been counterfeiting iPhones, iPads and even Apple stores for years, but now an enterprising Taipei publisher has gone one further and attempted to make a quick dollar in China and Taiwan by leeching off the greatest Apple asset of all: Steve Jobs.

Ecorebooks has put out the made-up looking 25 lessons that Steve Jobs taught the young, a book boasting a blurb from "Barack Obama" on the back cover, according to blogger Dan Bloom writing for Reuters.

The publication of the new book in China and Taiwan comes weeks after a previous book, Steve Paul Jobs' Eleven Pieces of Advice for Young People Today – also from Ecorebooks – was pulled from Chinese and Taiwanese bookshops for being a fake.

Eleven pieces of advice claimed to be a Chinese translation of "an Amazon bestseller" written by John Cage, supposedly the former editor of a financial magazine. It turns out the English version never existed, but it took bookshops a while to ditch the fake. Yes, apparently there is a law against fake books in Taiwan.

According to the Reuters' report, the faux book contained anecdotes about Chinese historical figures, and aphorisms such as "listen to the voice inside your heart, do what you want to do”.

While that could be passed off as a general lesson to draw from the life of Jobs, most of the book lacked any specific references to things Steve said or did. Chinese blog MicGadget said that the content of the biography never discussed when or in what circumstances Jobs issued the 11 pearls of wisdom.

Though maybe it's better that the youth of Taiwan and China don't get to hear about the real Steve. As this psychologist told us all this week, he is bad role model for the young. ®

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