Apple CEO Steve Jobs has endorsed the upcoming biography iSteve: The Book of Jobs. That’s a big deal, because Jobs is known for jealously guarding the details of his personal life.

In 2005, for example, Apple refused to carry any books by John Wiley & Sons, because it signed on to publish the unauthorized biography Con: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.

The literary news site GalleyCat reports the book is due out in early 2012 and that biographer Walter Isaacson spent three years “interviewing Jobs, his family members, Apple colleagues, and competitors to write this book.”

Isaacson has previously written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

Jobs, 56, has been battling pancreatic cancer and announced in January that he would take his third leave of absence in seven years.

The AP adds a bit more on the biographer:

Few biographers are better connected than Isaacson, a former top executive at CNN and Time magazine who has written best-sellers about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. He is currently the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a “nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute” in Washington, D.C.

“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world’s greatest innovators,” Jonathan Karp, publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement. “Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius.”