If you are one of the many fans of iPod and you like to read, you've got to check out The Cult of iPod by Leander Kahney. This is a graphics-heavy, designed, oversized paperback book of high quality. With an amazing cover photo. The price is high for a paperback at $24.95 but Amazon comes through with a 34% discount to get it down to $16.47. Which feels just right.
Kahney also wrote The Cult of Mac. I like this book much better. Partly, it's the amazingly vital and current iPod phenomenon. There's a lot going on and it's fun and interesting to read about and see. Kahney writes for Wired and it shows.
My favorite chapter is called I Want to Hold Your Handheld: Cultural Impact. And in that chapter, my favorite story is about an assistant professor in Marketing at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Markus Giesler has some interesting ideas. He thinks the iPod transforms listeners into "cyborg consumers". His website solicits iPod stories from volunteers for his research.
Here's a taste:
"The consumer is plugged into all kinds of technologies and networks that affect consumer behavior," he said. "As a result, consumption patterns change: from materiality to information - the internet; from ownership to access - file sharing; and from pattern to randomness - the iPod."
Giesler notes that jacking into the entertainment matrix changes consumption patterns. Random shuffle...isn't just a novel way to listen to music; it's one of the key constructs of digital entertainment. Giesler said that instead of trading individual songs, users are starting to trade entire hard drives: giant libraries of music or movies. When interviewees are asked how they dip into these libraries, picking items at random is the most common answer. "Shuffle mode used to be a gimmick. Now it is the most viable strategy to access information that would otherwise be lost", he said. "It reduces the complexity of consumption..."
