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The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness View Larger Image | Steven Levy
Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, Published October 2006, 284 pages, ISBN 0743285220 | List Price: $25.00
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On October 23, 2001, Apple Computer, a company known for its chic,
cutting-edge technology -- if not necessarily for its dominant market share
-- launched a product with an enticing promise: You can carry an entire music
collection in your pocket. It was called the iPod. What happened next exceeded
the company's wildest dreams. Over 50 million people have inserted the device's
distinctive white buds into their ears, and the iPod has become a global obsession.
The Perfect Thing is the definitive account, from design and marketing
to startling impact, of Apple's iPod, the signature device of our young century.
Besides being one of the most successful consumer products in
decades, the iPod has changed our behavior and even our society. It has transformed
Apple from a computer company into a consumer electronics giant. It has remolded
the music business, altering not only the means of distribution but even the
ways in which people enjoy and think about music. Its ubiquity and its universally
acknowledged coolness have made it a symbol for the digital age itself, with
commentators remarking on "the iPod generation." Now the iPod is beginning to
transform the broadcast industry, too, as podcasting becomes a way to access
radio and television programming. Meanwhile millions of Podheads obsess about
their gizmo, reveling in the personal soundtrack it offers them, basking in
the social cachet it lends them, even wondering whether the device itself has
its own musical preferences.
Steven Levy, the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek
magazine and a longtime Apple watcher, is the ideal writer to tell the iPod's
tale. He has had access to all the key players in the iPod story, including
Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom Levy has known for over
twenty years. Detailing for the first time the complete story of the creation
of the iPod, Levy explains why Apple succeeded brilliantly with its version
of the MP3 player when other companies didn't get it right, and how Jobs was
able to convince the bosses at the big record labels to license their music
for Apple's groundbreaking iTunes Store. (We even learn why the iPod is white.)
Besides his inside view of Apple, Levy draws on his experiences covering Napster
and attending Supreme Court arguments on copyright (as well as his own travels
on the iPod's click wheel) to address all of the fascinating issues -- technical,
legal, social, and musical -- that the iPod raises.
Borrowing one of the definitive qualities of the iPod itself,
The Perfect Thing shuffles the book format. Each chapter of this book
was written to stand on its own, a deeply researched, wittily observed take
on a different aspect of the iPod. The sequence of the chapters in the book
has been shuffled in different copies, with only the opening and concluding
sections excepted. "Shuffle" is a hallmark of the digital age -- and The
Perfect Thing, via sharp, insightful reporting, is the perfect guide to
the deceptively diminutive gadget embodying our era.
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