Mark Zuckerberg has a 10-year plan.
Veteran tech writer Steven Levy is working on a Facebook book that won’t be ready until 2019
Facebook is cooperating, just like Google did for Levy’s 2011 book.
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
So Steven Levy has a three-year plan: The veteran tech journalist is working on an in-depth book about Facebook that should debut in late 2019.
Levy doesn’t have a name for the book yet. But he does have a book deal — with Blue Rider Press, a Penguin Group imprint — and a commitment from Facebook to give him access to the company and its executives.
“They’re not giving me a badge or anything,” he said. “But I’ll obviously be visiting the campus to talk to a lot people.”
If you’ve followed Levy’s career, this sounds like a logical sequel to “In the Plex,” his 2011 deep dive on Google; that company also let Levy wander around campus for an extended period. That experience gives Levy confidence that stuff he learns by talking to Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other Facebook execs in 2016 won’t be irrelevant in 2019.
“It’s more of a portrait of a company in motion, in what I think is going to be a super important time in their history.”
This certainly won’t be the first book about Facebook, or even the first one by a big-name tech writer with access to Zuck and co. — David Kirkpatrick did one of those back in 2011, when Facebook had a mere 400 million users.
It will also likely be kinder to the principals then Ben Mezrich’s 2010 book, which became the basis for Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Network.” Ditto for “Chaos Monkeys,” the warts-and-all-want-to-see-more-warts-okay-here-are-more-warts tell-all that former Facebooker Antonio Garcia Martinez published this summer.
Meanwhile, Levy will continue to work at Backchannel, the tech site he started at Medium, but has been conveyed over to Conde Nast. But his agreement with Facebook means he won’t be able to report on what he sees over there for some time.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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