[5] He calls attention to the tension between preservation and access, and claims these goals need not conflict: "Why can't we have the benefits of the new and extravagantly expensive digital copy and keep the convenience and beauty and historical testimony of the original books resting on the shelves, where they've always been, thanks to the sweat and equity of our prescient predecessors?"

His other problems with microfilm include cost (p. 26), poor image quality ("edge-blurred, dark, gappy, with text cut off of some pages, faded to the point of illegibility on others," p. 14), and frustration with technology (p.39).

The author takes to task many past and present prominent librarians and preservationists, including Verner W. Clapp, Fremont Rider, Patricia Battin, and Pamela Darling.

Baker displays a distaste for library officials who advanced the notion that thousands of books and newspapers were on the verge of disintegrating: "Librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper's fragility" (p. 41).

In a letter to the editor in The New York Review of Books, Shirley K. Baker, a librarian writing on behalf of ARL, stresses that preservation decisions occur in a larger institutional context, and are concerned with more than just microfilm.

[18] Richard Cox, a professor and archivist from the University of Pittsburgh, responded to Double Fold with a book of his own; Vandals in the Stacks: A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries was published in 2002.

In 2000, Cox published a critique of Double Fold called "The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age" that appeared in the journal First Monday.

In both the article and the book, Cox admits that some good could come from public discourse about preservation issues, but maintains that "the problems are much more complex than Mr. Baker understands or cares to discuss.

"[20] Manoff notes that "discarding books and newspapers, however serious a problem, is not itself the destruction of history" but also acknowledges that the call for libraries to take on a stronger role in preserving the historical record is valid.