[scoops_]

Does the average person know that a physical book they bought can deteriorate with age, and pages can tear or fall out as well? But as long as they have that book in their possession, it belongs to them, and they can read it, lend it to someone else, to their heart’s content. How are discs any different? Surely a physical book is not “permanent” but it certainly has its own merit, as compared to a DRM ridden copy of a book from Amazon. Also, some people just enjoy collecting physical media.

[xg15]

Books are an interesting analogy: We do have books and scrolls that are hundreds of years old. And technically, those books did "deteriorate": The colors faded, pages were damaged or went missing, the whole book became much more sensitive to environmental conditions - and the scripts and languages they were written in became outdated or even lost.

And yet we can restore and preserve those books today, and experts can still read them. And occasionally, even a language that was lost completely is recovered - or a scroll that was burned in the eruption of Vesuvius: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-de...

[pibaker]

Books don't fail similarly as discs.

Tear a page off a book and the rest remains readable. Spill coffee on a book and you can still see the letters through the stain.

In the meanwhile make a single scratch and you can't read your CD anymore. I'm sure there are forensic technologies that restores the content of the disc but if you are just a random nobody your disc is as good as nothing.

Not to mention CD drives fail, too.

You may interpret the OP as being against physical media. But I think what he is actually after is the idea that if you have a piece of physical media, it lasts forever which is false.

[Sleaker]

Scratching discs doesn't typically render them permanently unreadable, unless the scratch gets to the metal. There are tools which resurface the discs.

[citadel_melon]

The problem is most people don’t realize how short disc media’s lifespan is.

Books it’s very obvious when it’s deteriorating or molding, hard drives and such are not to a laymen.

[pan69]

> The problem is most people don’t realize how short disc media’s lifespan is.

I have audio CDs from 1990 that play just fine and look to be in tip-top condition. Not so much CDs I have burned in the 2000s, they seem to fade, clearly a different manufacturing process. However, based on my older audio CDs, it seems that, if manufacturers want to produce quality, they certainly can.

[Ferret7446]

Analog audio CDs are different. Digital media fails catastrophically. Analog media fails gradually.

You can lose a lot of bits in analog audio and not notice a thing, especially as your hearing also degrades with age.

[bradgranath]

What's an Analog Audio CD?

[pan69]

Furthermore, a physical book (or disc) can't just be "taken away".