The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company By David A. Price, Narrated by David Drummond (Read Via Audible.com)

This book is obviously about the story of Pixar up till just after the Disney purchase and the release of Ratatouille. The relief of this book on how it was not an official PR approved piece. It did get into the details of the Disney issues and the internal politics at play on the Disney board. Not to mention some of Pixar’s more dark times.

The major piece that I found interesting was that Pixar was founded as a hardware company, and it looked like Jobs believed its market was as a hardware vendor. For a time, the animation department only survived for two reasons: One to help with the promotion of the product and two, to help pay the bills.

The other note that was interesting on how the author viewed Ed Catmul’s opinion of personal computers for a long time. That he thought they were not useful for a long time. However then again he did use computers that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is very much like a person who uses a super computer must feel today.

This is a solid 8/10 for a good biography of the founding of Pixar and the major players who surrounded it.