I’ve always wondered about the people endlessly tinkering around with the demo units at Apple stores. What the heck are they doing? Playing games? Surfing? Emailing?

Well, we know what one person was doing - writing a book.

Isobella Jade, an aspiring commercial model, has actually written her memoirs without owning her own computer. She’d write bits and pieces on demo units inside an Apple Store in Soho, New York, saving the files to her Yahoo account in email form, day after day. Isobella says she’s too poor to buy her own iMac, so she mooched off the Apple Store until her book, Almost 5′ 4″ was finished.

I remember one of my favorite writers, Harlan Ellison, who as a publicity stunt wrote one entirely while inside a store display window where you could watch him work from the street. Isobella’s stunt is more sneaky, though.

Her book has been self-published, but she has signed over the world rights to The Friday Project in the UK, and a commercial version of Almost 5′4″ will be available next year.

How she did it, and an interview with the author, is over at the Mental Floss blog.

(And man, here I am with 5 computers, and I can’t even finish one. Sheesh.)