Last year, writer Stephen Baker approached Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with an idea for a book about an IBM computer designed to compete against humans on Jeopardy! “I said, ‘There’s going to be a big match in January 2011 and we should really hurry and get a book out by September,” Baker recalled. “They said, ‘Forget it.’”
The publishing house said the story would be old news by the time Baker’s book was published. Instead, HMH suggested Baker report and write everything but the final chapter before the match taped so the book could be in stores the day after it aired on television. The result, “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything,” will go on sale in hardcover tomorrow. E-book readers, meanwhile, have been able to buy the book already; the final chapter will be beamed to them tomorrow.
