James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Genius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality--the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the poet's brilliant and doomed daughter, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. An then the information age comes upon us. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And they sometimes feel they are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. It will transform readers' view of its subject. James Gleick is our leading chronicler of science and modern technology. His first book, Chaos, a National Book Award finalist, has been translated into twenty-five languages. His best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. The Information was seven years in the making. Gleick divides his time between New York and Florida.

詹姆斯•格雷克（James Gleick），生于1954年，本科毕业于哈佛学院，曾长期在《纽约时报》担任记者和编辑，并多年为《时代》周刊撰写技术专栏。1987年，他的首部作品《混沌：开创新科学》入围了美国国家图书奖和普利策奖的决赛，并成为畅销书，使得“混沌”、“蝴蝶效应”的说法家喻户晓，现已销售超过百万册。其后他又陆续出版了《费曼传：1000年才出一个的科学鬼才》（1992）、《越来越快：飞奔的时代飞奔的一切》（1999）、《牛顿传》（2003）等书，相继被翻译成了二十多种语言。

他是最早一批投入Internet创业热潮的人。1993年11月，他与合作者联合推出了Pipeline互联网接入服务，率先提供了用户友好的图形界面。十四个月后，Pipeline以一千万美元股票的价格出售。