Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"IPod deserves a biography on its fifth birthday. It gets a deep and richly written one in Steven Levy's The Perfect Thing....His treatment of shuffle also highlights Levy's remarkable depth of access." Christian Science Monitor
Review
"The Perfect Thing is more entertaining than informative, but it makes a very satisfactory mash note. Gushing aside...it does a handy job of crystallizing and commemorating the dawn of the iPod age." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"This timely and well-narrated, if somewhat uncritical, look at a revolutionary gadget is likely to benefit from iPod's overwhelming commercial success. Recommended." Library Journal
Review
"A tech journalist pens a love letter to 'a very special gizmo'....An infomercial for a popular product." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Levy's book [is] close to a perfect thing...as much anthropological expedition as it is technological history....The Perfect Thing made a believer out of me. The essays are loads of fun, jammed with entertaining connections, unexpected riffs, and endless stuff you've never heard of before..." Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly (read the entire Washington Monthly review)
Synopsis
A Newsweek technology columnist traces the creation and popularity of the iPod, discusses such topics as Apple's unlikely position at the forefront of the technology, the iPod's role in changing the face of recorded music, and the contributions of CEO Steve Jobs and his team. 100,000 first printing.
Synopsis
A technology columnist for Newsweek goes inside Apple Computer and into the heads of millions of music lovers to show how CEO Steve Jobs and his team of engineers, programmers, and designers created a product that has become a business and cultural blockbuster.
About the Author
Steven Levy is a senior editor and the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek magazine. He is the author of five previous books, including Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which was voted the best sci-tech nonfiction book of the last twenty years by readers of PC magazine, and Insanely Great, the definitive account of the Macintosh computer. A native of Philadelphia, Levy lives in New York City with his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, and their son.
Table of Contents
Contents
iPod Timeline
Perfect
Identity
Origin
Cool
Personal
Download
Shuffle
Apple
Podcast
Coda
Afterword: iPod, iSaw, iConquered, iPhone
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index