Clouds and Libraries

I was thinking these past few days about the similarities between cloud computing and public libraries. I have been hearing off and on about how some people believe that the future of owning music will be storing mp3 files in remote servers, accessible online, so that a person could access their music (or movies, or whatever) from any place that has internet access. That way, no one would have to actually buy a physical copy of a piece of music, or any other kind of media, and find a way to store it.

I thought that, in a way, that notion is kind of like a public library. People can use a library as their book collection, without having to store books in their homes. Of course, a library isn't accessible from everywhere, but using one is a way to have access to a huge amount of media without having to store that media. Interesting...