[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.