Apple is so used to having its tame hacks write what it tells them that it gets into a bit of a quandary when they insist on writing the truth.

Bryan Appleyard wrote an extensive piece published in this week's Sunday Times about Steve Jobs and found that Apple's PR did its level best to squash the story. One Apple PR warned him that writing the biography of Jobs was “discouraged” and another PR rang up the editor of the Sunday Times to get the story halted.

In the US hacks would be bowing and scraping and getting moist at the prospect of doing Steve Jobs bidding, but in the EU, where press freedom is valued Jobs' Mob seems to have had a more difficult task. It is not the first time that Apple has tried to stop people printing the truth. iCon: Steve Jobs - The Greatest Second Act in The History of Business, a slight 2005 work by Jeffrey Young and William Simon, would have died a peaceful death in the remander market if Apple had not taken steps to get it banned from Apple stores.

In 2001 there was a row over Alan Deutschman's The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which, according to rumour, Jobs himself tried to suppress that book. He phoned up Random House chief executive Peter Olsen and called the book a "hatchet job."

Now the Sunday Times story that Apple tried to suppress is being circulated online and you have to wonder what the hell Jobs' Mob is worried about. The article itself is a reasonably balanced. There is a good Steve who is a genius and a bad Steve who is evil. However it appears that due to Apple's attempt to quash it and the subsequent reports of that unsuccessful kiboshing, far more people are reading it than would have otherwise been the case.

You can read it here.