Oh, I love that book!
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Coincidentally, this is where I was today:
These are only a few thousand years old, though. Oddly, there is one section of the cave that appears to have been done by children.
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No doubt this is the case, but at least I could still breathe a sigh of relief when I recently re-catalogued my own collection: even the cheapest burned cds from the year 2000 were still in good shape.
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Been dealing with LaserDisc rot so this no surprise.
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I kind of have the opposite problem. I have a hundred or so old CD-Rs I used for backups in the past and I’m going through all my junk and tossing stuff I don’t need.
I don’t need those (probably mostly bitrotted) backups because I switched to redundant hard drives and cloud storage a few years ago. But I do need a way of securely wiping the discs before I toss them.
Maybe a day outside in the sun will do the trick. 
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Combo drive? Nice!
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And don’t need a device to make material readable.
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The nice thing about writing on tablets is that setting your civilization on fire actually improves media durability.
Doesn’t help you much; but archaeologists appreciate it.
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Worst Response To A Crisis, 1985:
From a readers’ Q and A column in TV GUIDE: “If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?”
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I just assumed he had a Cronenbergian belly drive.
I just toss them into a shredder. If you don’t have a shredder, maybe you have a Shred Stop close by that you can use. That’s what I do.
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So by rotting can I compost?
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Apparently not or else they all have terrible SEO. Looks like I can buy a home CD shredder for $80 but not this month.
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Given enough time and a flexible definition of “compost”, sure. Everything composts. Eventually.
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I concluded at the time that it was planned obsolescence. If they were in a case like a floppy (you could buy such cases and readers that accepted them) they would be immortal and you’d never have to replace them, unlike scratched up Lp’s.
When I saw this OP I dug out some of my oldest burned disks, ca 2001, and they read perfectly. They were stored in a ringbinder of sleeves in a place cool, dark, but damp, my basement.
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Well, I remember trying to find decent CR-R media for backups and watching with happiness when CD prices went from $5/disc to $0.25/disc. Great! I bought the $5 high quality discs for backup and the $0.25 discs for quick distribution.
Then it turned out that the market of people wanting archival quality discs wasn’t large enough once they’d removed people who could buy cheaper discs. Within a year, the clerks at the store were telling me “Frankly, I don’t think there’s anyone left who sells a CD that I’d risk my data on. Want to buy a $0.25 disc or a $3K tape drive?”
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Go OLD school and keep them on paper.
Well they MADE CD caddys, but they were never popular.
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Well, hopefully… I guess it depends on what company made them. I’ve got a CD that’s about 30 years old, but that I bought in '96. If I hold it up to a light, I can see little pinholes through the metal layer, and that’s been the case almost since I had it. Maybe it was always like that, and I never had any trouble playing it, but I didn’t notice this with other discs.
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Well I HAVE worn out a commercial music CD, but I think that the cause was storing it in my car and slipping it in and out of the sleeve rather than simple age…
edited to add: It was How Did You Find Me Here by David Wilcox. One of those rare albums where almost every single song is great, IMHO.
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i chisel my backups into stone slabs and bury them in the desert. That way I can force people to look at baby photos for the next 50,000 years or so.
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