My record collection is physical. But the physical act of placing a record or a disc in its player isn't equivalent to opening a book and reading it. The music requires a technological go-between. So, while there's a correlation between the book and the words in it, that same correlation doesn't exist between the disc or record and the music it contains. We can read a book on our computer screens just as we can listen to music through a digital player on our computers, but perhaps the fact that some sort of go-between was necessary for music even before the computer is what made downloading music so much more obvious to us than downloading books. We're learning, however, that even downloading music isn't really necessary. A recent ReadWriteWeb blog post noted that:
As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download musicsuggesting that even our music "collections" on iTunes will in the not very distant future be a thing of the past. And when we can listen to whatever we choose without accessing our own copy of it, our already weakened sense of possession, our sense that possessing something is truly necessary, is further undermined.