Don’t miss Jeremy Eichler’s excellent piece in the Sunday Boston Globe about digitizing his music collection.
The premise:
I’ve been thinking not only about the virtues of high-tech listening but also about what’s been lost in our headlong sprint into the digital future . . .
To begin with, there is nothing left to hold in our hands.
That’s the equivalent of “losing music’s corporeality, its thing-ness,” Eichler writes.
There’s also the loss of the hunt, that “working hard to track down a particular recording, thumbing through the bins, or scouring the holdings of used-music stores.”
And don’t forget the autobiographical nature of acquiring music recordings. Eichler: “They help us hold together the fugitive pieces of both a historical and a personal past.”
That’s why digitizing your music collection produces such a soulless result – or, as Eichler says, “why, exactly, collecting music now means so much less.”
Your book quest story goes here.
Campaign Outsider 
I disagree that “digitizing your music collection produces such a soulless result”. This is most easily seen in a networked environment (like a workplace) where collections are shared out for listening by other users. You are, to some extent, defined by the music collection you share. It’s a view into the sharer’s “soul”.
By the same token, when you have friends over to your place and you’re listening to music, it’s the *music* that’s on display, not the music packaging.
I do lament the passing of liner notes and lyric sheets, but I don’t miss having to deal with a wall full of vinyl or a smaller cabinet full of CDs when I want to find a particular disk to play.