I borrow a lot of CDs and DVDs from the library, and I'm always amazed at how poorly people treat optical media.  Not just finger prints and smudges, but deep scratches and thorough abrasions.  What is it, exactly, that people do with these disks?  Give them to their dogs as chew toys?  Use them on their disk sanders to refinish their deck?  As an anal retentive perfectionist, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that those death metal CDs I bought 15 years ago when I was in high school are still in mint condition.  That's how I roll. 

I wonder whose idea it was to store important information in optical format with no sort of protective measures to prevent loss of optical quality.  Remember floppy disks?  They had that little metal door that slid over to reveal the disk when it was inserted in the computer.  Even audio tapes, which fully exposed their ribbon-like tape at the bottom, at least had a convenient plastic enclosure so your big fat fingers wouldn't mess up all the data.  I guess my point is this:  Let's just digitize everything so we can stop dealing with error-prone optical media. #technology