Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt is shopping around a book to New York publishers.
According to Crain's New York, Schmidt will pen a book called Empire of the Mind: The Dawn of the Techno-Political Age, about the effect of technology on authoritarian governments.
The book will be co-authored with 29-year-old Jared Cohen, formerly of the U.S. State Department. Cohen is also the director of the Google Ideas think tank, started this fall. The book is an outgrowth of an essay that recently appeared in Foreign Affiars called "The Digital Disruption," which Cohen and Schmidt wrote together.
Cohen already has two books under his belt, One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide and Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East.
Schmidt's literary agent, Mel Parker, has several publishers bidding to land the book in an auction that will end Tuesday.
An editor called the "policy oriented" text especially timely, in light of the current situation in Egypt. Presumably feeling the threat from mounting protests organized in part via social-networking sites, Egyptian authorities have cut off Internet access in the country. Protests in Egypt were partially inspired by similar demonstrations in Tunisia last month, for which Twitter and Facebook also played an important role.
Reports have also said that Schmidt is trying to land his own show on CNN, produced by Liza McGuirk, who is the executive producer of "Parker Spitzer."
Schmidt announced recently that after 10 years at Google's helm, he would pass the CEO torch to company co-founder Larry Page. He's not walking away from Google, though. Schmidt will take on a more external role as executive chairman.