icholson Baker loves the printed word almost more than is good for him. He loves it enough to have risked the withering displeasure of the nation's librarians, not all of whom appreciated his New Yorker articles bewailing the demise of the card catalog and the reckless culling of crowded library shelves. He loves it enough to have staked his retirement savings on a bid to redeem the British Library's collection of old American newspapers from the hands of scrap dealers. He loves it enough, even, to have taken considerable time out from a career authoring light-handedly brilliant and occasionally bestselling novels (including 1992's Vox, the phone-sex divertissement famously given by Monica Lewinsky to the Big Creep in Chief as a token of her, you know, whatever) to research and write Double Fold, a lectern-thumping, save-the-books exposé of modern library management that is sure to win him sainthood among bibliophiles but not likely to do much, I'm afraid, for Nicholson Baker-philes.

Meticulously (not to say obsessively) researched, Double Fold documents an ongoing holocaust of books, journals, and newspapers merely hinted at in Baker's New Yorker pieces. Over the last half century, librarians have transferred to microfilm and hard disk something like a million volumes' worth of the Gutenberg galaxy's public sphere, blithely consigning the paper originals to landfills, pulping mills, and—God help us—those people who will sell you the front page of a newspaper from the day you were born.

This purge has largely been carried out in the name of saving space or, perversely enough, preserving books from their own decay, but Baker makes short work (at great length) of these rationales. The cost of warehousing a book, he notes, is still far less than that of scanning it. And the notion that microfilm and digital copies do a better job of preserving the printed sources' information content turns out to be a lamentable technophilic delusion. While the newer media are riddled with problems (film-eating fungi, for example), paper—despite a persistent myth that books are crumbling to dust—remains the only medium short of tombstones proven to preserve text for centuries. Sure, the highly acidic paper common in the last hundred years does turn pages brittle, and if you crumple one of those pages it will indeed turn to confetti. But leave it quietly on the shelf, subject only to the tender ministrations of the average reader and an adequate ventilation system, and it can remain accessible almost indefinitely. "Leave the books alone, I say, leave them alone, leave them alone," Baker writes, histrionically. If there is justice in the world of letters, his plea will be heard and, God willing, he will never feel obliged to write a book so teeth-grindingly, one-notedly strident again.

Don't get me wrong. I'll take Nicholson Baker's version of strident over, say, George F. Will's any day. And I don't believe there's anything inherently wearisome about a document of one man's monomania. Indeed, the best of Baker's fiction is nothing but: U and I's autobiographical protagonist spends the book brooding on his entirely imaginary relationship with John Updike; The Fermata's likeably creepy Arno Strine uses his magical time-stopping powers for little else but stealing glimpses of women with their clothes off. But though you can sense Baker attempting here and there to breathe some of the obsessive charm of these works into Double Fold—he pauses often to linger over the minutely expressive details of books and newspapers lost to the maw of progress—it's clear that charming us isn't a top priority this time out. Baker's trademark minutiae here just pile up like so much ballast for his rhetorical dreadnought; his trademark wit stiffens into sarcastic potshots at the book's designated villains, a motley crew of 20th-century library-policy gurus whom Baker almost succeeds in bringing to life on the page but can't quite bring himself to humanize.

Double Fold By Nicholson Baker Random House, 384 pp. $25.95 Buy this book

And yes, it may seem nutty to judge what is essentially an Information Age jeremiad by the standards of the postmodern comic novel. But I do think that in opting so staunchly for the single-minded methods of argument over the more multidimensioned sensibility of fiction writing, Baker missed a chance to make Double Fold speak more amply about its great subtextual theme, which is after all a key conundrum of the Information Age, postmodernity, or whatever else you want to call these data-daffy circum-millennial times: the fact that information itself is undivorceably both matter and abstraction, occupying not just the boundless head space of image and meaning, but the pricey real space of sagging shelves and bloated hard drives.

Baker at one point hits the nail on the head: "The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas," he writes, explaining his conviction that libraries should aspire to be museums as much as databases. "They are things and utterances both." Elsewhere, though, he insists on seeing only the thingness of the things. He compares the substitution of microfilm for books to trashing someone's car and giving them a photo of it instead. He says it's like demolishing a building but keeping the blueprints. These analogies are crap, but their one-sidedness accurately reflects his extreme attachment to the printed object. Even museums have to select from the world's great ocean of artifacts which few they save for posterity, but Baker seems to genuinely believe the library community has an obligation to archive as many yellowing, dust-gathering, shelf-busting copies as they can of every title ever published.

The pity is that had Baker shown more than a prosecutorial curiosity about what motivates his bad guys to destroy books rather than save them—had he not just exposed their stated motivations as self-delusory, but gone on to wonder why they'd want to fool themselves in the first place, he might have illuminated the ways in which his own obsessions mirror theirs. Had he more than merely mentioned in an endnote Vannevar Bush's visionary 1945 essay "As We May Think," a touchstone text of the information sciences, he might have conveyed something of the almost messianic dreams that compel modern librarians to wage war on paper. Written back when microfilm was still avant-garde tech, Bush's essay imagined an office-of-the-future device called the Memex—a desk-size reader containing within it the microfilmed text of every document anyone could want to read, searchable so that the user could sail through the universe of texts as if through open seas. Nowadays, the Memex is generally recognized as the Ur-inspiration for the World Wide Web. But what's perhaps more significant is its culture-shaping vision of information as liberated from the drag of matter, its presence stripped to nothing more than light on a screen.

As Baker rightly notes, no information can ever be that free. But ultimately, Bush's fantasy is no crazier than Baker's. In essence, both of them dream of having access to all the information ever published, and it drives them nuts to see a single scrap of it fall through the cracks. But the world and all the order in it are always slipping through the cracks, and the failure to reconcile oneself to that is, among other things, as good a definition of obsessive compulsion as any. Which isn't to say obsessions don't have their fringe benefits. The fixations of Baker's characters, for instance, light up mundane, underknown corners of the world with their glow. And while it's too bad Baker's own fixation couldn't have done the same for the mundane, underknown world of libraries, it'll be no small thing if it helps save them from the mad science of their keepers.

Julian Dibbell is the author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World.

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