I, too, have long wondered about the frailty of optical discs. When Laserdiscs and CDs were developed in the 70s, I can understand them maybe not anticipating how important it would be to protect the media itself. Vinyl records were the standard then, and they get scratched very easily, and get damaged just by being left out of their sleeves (dust in the grooves). But there was fuck-all you could do to improve on that design. There was also an "Ohh, shiny!" factor. Optical discs were new, space-age technology. They were read by lasers. They had rainbows coming off of them in the light. People might have actually been impressed by the appearance of the disc itself, and they were used to walking on pins & needles handling their media, carefully holding it by the edges, and having it degrade with each play.
But what I can't understand is why now, 30 years later, we're still fucking around with bare optical discs. We're expected to keep carefully placing them in and out of their trays, but in the real world that often doesn't happen. They get put into those CD binders, they float around peoples' cars, people leave them lying on desks. They get scratched, it's a fact of life. And it could all be avoided with a simple plastic casing with a sliding door, built as a standard part of the medium, like you had on floppy disks. If not for simply the amount of time that discs have been around, DVDs and Blue-Rays pack way more bytes into a square inch. So they're much more susceptible to the scratches that occur when they come in contact with, well, any surface at all. And yet we still don't have protection.
I'd even go so far as to speculate that it may be intentional on the part of the companies that developed these standards. No casing on the disc means lower production costs (though, interesting thought: the casing and the "box" could become one). It also means more damaged discs. And a damaged disc is one that can't be re-sold. If the stuff on it is good enough, the consumer may even buy a new disc to replace it. Even better, he might buy the deluxe director's cut reissue on SACD -- another bare optical disc.
