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…

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…

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
 
Levy is one of the best informed and best connected journalists writing about tech companies, and this book is the result of more than two hundred interviews with Google staff past and present and his…

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
 
Thoroughly original critique of conventional wisdom about web 2.0 trends: Lanier complains that the idea of a person is degraded by the techonology deployed on social networking sites which effectively fragments us into slivers of ‘content’…

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
 
Kelly is a distinguished tech journalist (former executive editor of Wired magazine) and knows everyone who’s ever been anyone in Silicon Valley. Like all the best techies of a…

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…

Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology by Charles Ferguson
 
With hindsight, tech change looks like a story of serial revolutions. But at any one time, things seem pretty stable and it’s surprisingly hard to spot those revolutions until they’re part of history…

How to Thrive in the Digital Age by Tom Chatfield
 
How should we adapt our personal and professional lives to the new tools of digital communication? Answers tend to polarise between hopes that the digital revolution is the answer to all our problems…

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman
 
As a genre, self-help can mean large type, lots of space between paragraphs and annoying ‘to do’ lists. But The Start-up of You is different. Its co-author…