Apple's Deals May Transform Digital Music

(Corrects spelling of Russ Crupnick)

Compared with buying e-books, building a digital music collection is a hassle. E-books zip directly to reading devices like the Kindle and Nook and are backed up "in the cloud"—on the servers of Amazon.com (AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (BKS). A digital song, on the other hand, is typically downloaded to a PC and must then be manually transferred to an iPod or mobile phone. If you lose your Kindle, you can always download an e-book again; if the PC crashes or the iPod falls into the bathtub, the song goes down with it.