Have a USB drive Hard Drive, or USB? Plug them in 10 to 15 years later, chances are, they will have far less damage than a book in all those years.
It's an unfair comparison.
From a Library of congress study: "The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer."
https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rott...
- Assuming the software does not change
- Assuming the usb device is stored securely and lightly used.
Bit rot is real
Your point is moot. there's a reason we moved to digital media, and why nobody keeps paper copies of everything, aside for last-resort scenarios (which once again includes physical media that nobody ever touches)