EXCLUSIVES

BOOK REVIEWS
January 2004

iPod: The Missing Manual
Review by Erez Reuveni

Apple's iPod is the most popular portable MP3 player on the market. Media coverage surrounding Apple's iTunes¨ Music Store helped the company sell 304,000 iPod units in the quarter ending in June 2003. With so many new iPod users, on both the Apple and Windows¨ platforms, it seems logical that O'Reilly Press would release yet another in a long line of Apple product bibles. iPod: The Missing Manual is just that - an organized and detailed compendium explaining how to utilize the iPod's numerous features.

Written by J.D. Biersdorfer, a technology columnist for The New York Times, the manual starts off by explaining the various nuances of the iPod's musical capabilities. This section can be skipped by those who are seasoned iPod users, but makes for useful information for those who have only recently purchased an iPod. Topics covered include the concept of "syncing," USB and FireWire connections, digital audio formats, and a rundown of how to use iTunes. For those who own a Windows machine and an iPod, a brief discussion of MusicMatch, the software Apple elected to use for its Windows-based players, is also included.

O'Reilly Press is renowned for its in-depth instructionals and the iPod manual is no exception. After detailing the basics, Biersdorfer jumps into the more advanced features the iPod provides. Two thorough chapters describe how to turn the iPod into a PDA. Address books can be downloaded from a computer or edited on the iPod directly and calendars can be transferred from several sources, including iCalª, Palm Pilots, Microsoft¨ Entourage¨, and Microsoft¨ Outlook¨. Information on how to transfer notes and to-do lists, as well as utilizing the iPod as an alarm clock or stopwatch, are also included.

Biersdorfer waxes informative on hard drive and eBook features as well: the iPod can be made into an external hard disk and booted as the start-up disk. The iPod can also be used to download eBooks for use later, even providing the option to convert text into audio so that users can listen to their eBooks through an iPod. Finally, means of launching Linux on the portable player are discussed, as well as numerous software and hardware for integrating the iPod into car and home.

While most of the information in the book isn't revolutionary, Biersdorfer does include various tidbits useful even to the most tested iPod devotee. The manual makes for good reference material for iPod users both old and new.

Publisher: O'Reilly > Price:$24.95
Softcover Pages: 331 > www.oreilly.com

Exit Strategy by Douglas Rushkoff
Review by Chris Mace

Rushkoff, a renowned media theorist and author of nine books on new media and popular culture, is obsessed with technology and how it affects experience and perception. He is also an Apple fan and laments the domination of the clunkier Windows paradigm, citing its use to manipulate consumers.

"Exit Strategy" is set in New York City during a second technology bull market in 2008. The collapse of the first is attributed to a lack of faith, and people have enslaved themselves in a technology-driven, bull market mentality. As such, it is a modern day Joseph parable (a Jew in the Egyptian court who led his people to freedom).

Jamie, the son of a rabbi and an ex-hacker, finds himself at the right hand of a powerful investment banker and increasingly loses his ethical compass and ability to distance himself from the ruthless corporate culture he once dismissed as a mere game.

On an elite business retreat in Montana, things get pagan when prostitutes mock-roast a man over a bonfire. Later, he is forced to hold a calf's legs as his boss castrates it to claim their breakfast - "prairie oysters." Back in the city, he increasingly sees bulls' heads on people, a symbol of false gods and enslavement.

He is so crazed that his old hacking crew (after taking the fall for a computer virus they co-wrote in high school, he won a free ride to Princeton and lost contact) dupes him into promoting an outlandish technology that he sells to someone he knows will prevent it from going to market. Once Jamie quits, intending to come clean and join his old crew, he sees them as bulls - the result of their addiction to an Internet browser (designed by crew member, El Greco) that has evolved into an AI and adapts to the user. One by one, they must deprogram themselves to become free.

Exit Strategy was originally published on Yahoo! as an open-source text. Online readers added footnotes as if they were future scholars interpreting the text upon its discovery in the 23rd century, in a matter-of-fact tone well-suited to embalming contentious topics.

Though smart and fast paced, it reads like Huxley's Brave New World when you have to wade through less-than-compelling allegorical passages for the sake of a message. And although it is an exciting page-turner, and although Rushkoff relegates Steven King to a footnote as "a period fiction hack," he manages to combine the best of both authors.

Publisher: Soft Skull Press > Price $16
Pages 334 > www.rushkoff.com