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

I was charmed by the iPod from the day of its release. The groundbreaking digital music player also became a classic story of a product becoming a cultural phenomenon And of course, now we know that the Apple’s iPod blazed the way for the iPhone.

The Perfect Thing tells the story of the iPod, with lots of input from Steve Jobs and his team. But its also a meditation about how music fuses with identity, the transformative power of solo listening (with an intimate history of the Walkman), the birth of podcasting, the selling of digital content, and the mysterious power of shuffling. So enamored was I of shuffling my music collection with the iPod that I wrote The Perfect Thing as a series of stand-alone essays that I literally shuffled, with four different versions of the book.