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Not exactly right. We have paper books that are centuries old, yes, but they have to be restored for the most part. Most of them were not made with archival ink and paper, so had retouches done on them every 50-100 years. They've been rebound more than a few times. In some cases, the paper has been completely replaced in them. And of all that, there are still a small percentage of books from centuries old. They were taken care of. They were the property of the rich.
Now, I have books from 1960 that were bought in a bookstore. They're yellowed. The ink is actually flaking off the pages. I've got some pulp from 1950s that are literally crumbling. Your average book that you buy now from a book store won't make it 50 years, the quality of the paper is so poor.
I have files from back when The Lion King came out, and a bunch of my friends and I were writing fanfiction (okay, okay, I know.) They're .txt files. They've not changed ONE SINGLE BIT (pun intended) in almost two decades. You can open them and read them, just the same exact spacing and everything as I penned them in 1994. And, provided that the storage media stays safe and I copy it to the new media, this will be this way for decades. Millenia.
Add to this, that storage size gets bigger and physical storage size gets smaller, and soon we will have the ability to put all of the written words of mankind onto a CD sized disc.
The problem you have reading digital files a few decades old is similar to the problem we have reading books a few decades old. Materials degrade.
Which is easier to do, with regards to passing material on? Producing paper, producing ink, copying the words to the paper from the source, binding the material into a book..
Or typing "cp /source/story.txt /dest/story.txt"
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