The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy
The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy
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The Perfect Thing
How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

Author: Steven Levy

Narrator: Anthony Rapp

Abridged: 4 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/23/2006


Synopsis

The iPod has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon, giving us a new vocabulary (we shuffle our iTunes on our nanos), revolutionizing the way we experience music and radio through the invention of podcasting, opening up new outlets for video, and challenging the traditional music industry as never before. The design itself has become iconic: there is even a shade of white now called iPod White.

Steven Levy has had rare access to everyone at Apple who was involved in creating the iPod -- including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom he has known for over twenty years. In telling the story behind the iPod, Levy explains how it went from the drawing board to global sensation. He also examines how this deceptively diminutive gadget raises a host of new technical, legal, social, and musical questions (including the all-important use of one's playlist as an indicator of coolness), and writes about where the iPhenomenon might go next in his new Afterword. Sharp and insightful, The Perfect Thing is part history and part homage to the device that we can't live without.

Author Bio

Steven Levy is Wired's editor at large. The Washington Post has called him "America's premier technology journalist." His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written eight books, and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the past twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.

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