Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business by Porter Erisman
 
The slogans of most internet tycoons suggest the clean lines and aggressive culture of Silicon Valley: “move fast…

Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft by Jim Clark
 
The stock market flotation of Netscape in the summer of 1995 made all the front pages and network news shows, alerting anyone who hadn’t been paying attention, to the dot com boom…

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
 
There’s a pun in the title: it’s about how the company operates, not how Google search is engineered. So you may be a little disappointed if you are expecting techy insights. Instead, this is a slightly preachy but interesting ‘how to’ book…

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
 
 
Eli Pariser’s concept of the filter bubble is a metaphor: he fears we’re increasingly exposed only to information that software has chosen for us in response to how we have behaved online in the past…

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
 
This is an odd cocktail of a book made up of three ingredients, shaken or stirred together with varying success. 
 
First, there’s the science: beautifully written, poetic but rigorous explanations of how trees grow and reproduce: like Biology A level taught by Seamus…

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen
 
 
There’s an interesting idea behind this book: a prof from Harvard Business School, having overcome a life-threatening cancer, considers how we would live our lives if we…

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
 
 People who are interested in the future of technology tend to believe that its impact on jobs and the economy is, and will be, largely benign. 
 
 OK, people in…

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

It’s more than five years since a computer called Watson beat two quiz champs on Jeopardy, the American TV game…

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

It’s more than five years since a computer called Watson beat two quiz champs on Jeopardy, the American TV game…

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
 
What’s the most important story of our time? Global warming? The industrialisation of China…