In the Preface of Judith Schalansky’s book of essays, An Inventory of Losses (2018) she writes about the future of permanence in media and books:
"Sometimes I imagine the future thus: generations to come standing baffled in front of today’s data storage media, strange aluminum boxes whose contents, owing to rapid advances in platforms have become not but meaningless codes, and moreover ones that, as an object in themselves, exude less of an aura than the knots of an Inca quipu string, as eloquent as they are mute, or those mystifying ancient Egyptian obelisks that may commemorate triumph or tragedy, one knows."
But later in the Preface as a writer and a book designer (see the previous posting about her Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands), Schalansky offers a defense of the book.
“The book may be inferior in many ways to the new, seemingly incorporeal media that lay claim to its legacy and overwhelm us with information, and may be a conservative medium in the original sense of the word, but it is the only one which, by the very self-sufficiency of its body, in which text, image and design dovetail perfectly with one another, promises to lend order to the world or sometimes even to take its place.”
