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iPod, Therefore I Am | 
| Author: Dylan Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 456932
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1596910216
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.28565
EAN: 9781596910218
ASIN: 1596910216
Publication Date: October 13, 2005
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
A music lover’s astonishing account of his obsession with the iPod, and a fascinating look at the phenomenon that has revolutionized the way we hear music.
First came fire, the wheel, and penicillin…and then, according to Dylan Jones, a compulsive album collector, music journalist, and multi award-winning men’s magazine editor, the next great invention to bless the human race was the iPod, Apple’s groundbreaking mp3 player. Small, sleek, and sexy, but with the capacity to hold up to ten thousand songs, the iPod has stunned music lovers and gadget enthusiasts around the world. It has delighted indie-rock college kids and elderly jazz fans, classical musical buffs and teenage hip-hop hustlers, almost no technology has so seamlessly crossed the great divide.
In iPod, Therefore I Am, Jones tells the story of his own entree into this exponentially growing cult, taking the reader on a hilariously candid journey through his lifelong addiction to all genres of music, however unfashionable. Along the way, he gives a tantalizing behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of the iPod, from its original conception by Steve Jobs, the man who famously reinvented Apple Computer, to the landmark design of Jonathan Ive, the innovative designer who has become a legend in his own time. Behind it all, we get an insight into the way that the iPod has radically transformed the way we approach music, listen to music, and possess music—turning all of us into curators. Appendices containing Jones’s top playlists and his expert tips on getting the most out of your iPod make this love song to the iPod as practical as it is entertaining.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 On the List or Off the List: What's Up with The King? August 24, 2008
David W. Dellinger (North Shore of Oahu)
Author Jones makes a point of stating that he has NO Elvis recordings on his personal iPod, yet in the appendix, "100 Songs You Absolutely Must Have In Your Life," he lists Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never" at #10.
Did Jones even read his own book? Or did an editor at the publishing company decide the book wouldn't be complete without a "Top 100" list and slip this in at the end?
As other reviewers have noted, to a large extent this book reads like a series of not-entirely-connected essays. Each chapter is interesting, but the whole is not entirely cohesive.
But what do I know? Unlike Dylan Jones, I'm not kickin' back by the pool in Ibiza after another night of partying, putting together my latest uber-cool iPod techno mix. So I guess he's doing something right!
It's a fun read, but don't expect an exhaustive history of the creation of the iPod, nor anything more substantial than one guy's anecdotal description of the soundtrack of his life. I liked it, and I'll be passing my copy along to a music-loving friend.
 Ugh. July 20, 2007
Daniel Skorik (Anytown, CT, USA)
Jones writes about 20 pages writing about the iPod, regurgitating facts that just about everyone knows. The rest of the book is stupid, poorly written crap about his boring personal life and his "love of music". Skip this one if you're into the iPod's history, this is nothing new and not worth the paper its printed on.
"A cigarette pack in cocaine white" November 14, 2006
John L Murphy (Los Angeles)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The disease of iPod addiction, as diagnosed by one enjoying his stay in the intensive (audial) care ward, a rock (music) junkie. I read this just after [I also reviewed these on Amazon], Leander Kahney's Cult of IPod and Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84. All three recent books cover the past three decades from a young middle-aged writer's partially autobiographical perspective. They all mix at various levels the blends of pop music with corporate retail with experimental electronics-- as sold often by more of an individual and maverick creator to be treasureed by a self-identified subculture. Jones happens to be from his birthdate only a year off from me, so many of the trends, fashions, and musical trends of course proved familiar. Like Reynolds, he looks back on the past forty years of a life spent with music. Like Kahney, he seeks to uncover the impact of the IPod through a combination of personal experience and journalistic research.
Here, he purports to show how his new ability to compact the soundtrack of his life into a hand-held device, his encounters with the eras of glam, punk, disco, jazz, and a lot of classic and unclassifiable rock can all be plumbed for significance. He concludes that the iPod emerges as the most significant example within his memory of how technology influences content, or the consumption of content. A good thesis, but even in only a couple of hundred smallish pages with generous margins, the concision of this observation does not need such extended personal validation. The threads tying his initiation into the lair of the white box to all of the patterns from the rest of what he includes here as his life look unravelled and frayed.
I agree with Jones' ratings of Sgt Pepper & Exile on Main Street, but not his assessment of Siouxsie & the Banshees' The Scream of "Pere Ubu's 'difficult' second album." I disagree that the 80s per se were best symbolized by the rise of the CD; most people of us (at least outside of London's New Romantic jetset) only were acquiring discs near the end of the decade, the talismanic LP's powers fading gradually, most noticeably only at the decade's close. I agree with his succinct, suitably elegant profile of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.
Jones adds his own memories to an overview of how miniaturized electronics shifted from utility of function (power & data) to unity of links (WWW & networks) and now to the pleasure of the "personal computer" (or Mac) hedonist (iPods & PowerBooks. He recalls his pop music journalism for i-D, relates a few of the scenes he saw at clubs, tries to summarize how the 80s designer hedonism engendered today's total selling of products as lifestyle trends, and argues that the 5% of the world hip and tuned in to trends before everyone else in the 70s has also given way to a fusion of marketing niches and massive consumer buy-in to fetishizing consumption.
These points are made sensibly and easily, and Jones often either amuses or confounds by mixing an impressively wide familarity of what he stocks his 40GB iPod with with songs both of a dully familiar hum and totally obscure, record-geek squawk. He recounts the effects the iPod has on his life. He notes the reactions of his friends. Confusingly, he boasts of his enormous record collection, but then seems to imply all of it was uploaded judiciously to his 40GB library with room to spare. How large his presumably vast (given his profession and avocation) musical storehouse in its original storage appears in my estimation far less in bulk and raw potential than I would have predicted.
The chapters on Steve Jobs, the 80s, and some of his musical ruminations about disco and jazz appear as if from other material Jones had prepared aside from his chronicled courtship of his own iPod. I get the sense that this sporadically reappearing rationale for the book-length report would have been better limited to a 5000 word article. What could have been told quite well as a long feature here gets dispersed into a diffused cultural commentary such as Kahney or Reynolds produced-- as mingled with a musical autobiography similar to that (with both protagonists sharing a few lists) fictionalized in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. Or Hornby's own recollections as non-fictional musings in a similar key, Songbook.
All of Jones' pieces are not joined. For example, how or if he manages to convert his uploaded audio files from the good AAC to the great AIFF format is left unclear as he recounts that episode. His book ends with an admission that the magical white box has worsened his collecting affliction. The magical device combined with the power of the Net that can retrieve ever more scarce songs compounds his acquisition addiction. Other chapters cover seduction and the right tune; the evolution of MP3s; glam and punk as Jones bought into them; the links between Macs, Apple, and PCs; how the "portable open database" that would be the POD with the "I" of the Internet inspired Jonathan Ive's design; and ITunes delivery. All these parts have potential as self-contained essays, but their cohesion into this assemblage of fifteen chapters needs further elucidation.
Jones leaves his demonstration of the iPod and its impacts on society incomplete. That and a bit on how the iPod can help speed seduction are the contents. This ultimately brief book feels much longer, and not all for the good of the reader in its meandering contents. A working draft & promising thesis, but this version needed lots more revision before it should have been published. P.S. For an editor, Jones should have checked that the RCA MP3 player is not called "Lycra," and that HP's now-disgraced dictator given the moniker of Carlton P. did not feminize her name quite so drastically as to be "Cary" Fiorina.
 For any who would understand where the future of music is heading December 4, 2005
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The iPod's ease and compact attraction to music lovers has moved it far from the realm of the computer geek, and author Dylan Jones explores this phenomenon in considering the music's effect on the ipod and visa versa. From the origins of the ipod idea by Steve Jobs to the latest phenomenon of 'podcasting', IPod, Therefore I Am: Thinking Inside The White Box is for any who would understand where the future of music is heading.
 Should Have Been An Essay October 9, 2005
TMCOG
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book must have been a struggle to write because it just does not contain enough interesting information to warrant it being book length. Yes, music is transformative and restorative in so many ways. We use songs as anchors to motivate and inspire us. Our musical memories are associative and connect us to so many events inn our lives. And iPods are great little devices that have become pop culture icons. This is probably the reason this book will sell some copies. I think it could have been a powerfully insightful essay, concise and poignant. As a book, it fluff. Boring, dull, poorly written fluff.
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