For Baker, nothing is unworthy of preservation because the seemingly trivial is the unique matter of our lives. In raging yet controlled prose, he details the efforts of American libraries to save space and modernize their collections by replacing original copies of American newspapers and at least 1 million books with microfilm and digital copies. The history he relates is infuriating enough. A warehouse the size of a Home Depot, which would hold a century of newsprint. Baker shows the folly of this idea.
Technicians often skip pages, leaving works incomplete.
In essence, it was far sexier to raise large amounts of money to apply cutting-edge technology to their collections than it was to build a few sheds and resew some loose bindings. To realize their dreams, Baker reports, they seized on the acid content of older books and newspapers to gin up a false crisis. With a mixture of bad faith and bad science, librarians concocted bad data to argue that America's recoded past was turning to dust. In fact, he writes, acid does most of its damage in the first 50 years after printing, weakening but never destroying the pages. After that, the book's condition is relatively stable.