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 iPod. What happened next exceeded company's wildest dreams. Over 50 million people have inserted device's distinctive white buds into their ears, and iPod has become a global obsession. Perfect Thing is definitive account, from design and marketing to startling impact, of Apple's iPod, signature device of our young century.Besides being one of most successful consumer products in decades, 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 music business, altering not only means of distribution but even ways in which people enjoy and think about music. Its ubiquity and its universally acknowledged coolness have made it a symbol for digital age itself, with commentators remarking on the iPod generation. Now iPod is beginning to transform broadcast industry, too, as podcasting becomes a way to access radio and television programming. Meanwhile millions of Podheads obsess about their gizmo, reveling in personal soundtrack it offers them, basking in social cachet it lends them, even wondering whether device itself has its own musical preferences.Steven Levy, chief technology correspondent for Newsweek magazine and a longtime Apple watcher, is ideal writer to tell iPod's tale. He has had access to all key players in iPod story, including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom Levy has known for over twenty years. Detailing for first time complete story of creation of iPod, Levy explains why Apple succeeded brilliantly with its version of MP3 player when other companies didn't get it right, and how Jobs was able to convince bosses at big record labels to license their music for Apple's groundbreaking iTunes Store. (We even learn why 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 iPod's click wheel) to address all of fascinating issues -- technical, legal, social, and musical -- that iPod raises.Borrowing one of definitive qualities of iPod itself, Perfect Thing shuffles 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 iPod. The sequence of chapters in book has been shuffled in different copies, with only opening and concluding sections excepted. Shuffle is a hallmark of digital age -- and Perfect Thing, via sharp, insightful reporting, is perfect guide to deceptively diminutive gadget embodying our era.