By Ian Shoales

this April, San Francisco opened a new Main Library. The improved facility has a heightened decor, oodles of Internet access, special collections galore, and a Friends of the Library Store, where one can buy the "I'm With Kafka!" T-shirt and a postcard of a book.

I seem to be the only person in a 200 mile radius who's mildly depressed about the new library, though I admit I haven't gone to it yet. When I do, maybe I'll be as awestruck as everybody else. I wonder if awe is the appropriate response to a library, though. I thought a library was a boring old stone edifice full of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. You can't market that, I guess.

As a matter of fact, books, of which a library is supposed to be a repository, were not mentioned much in the promotions surrounding the library's grand opening. Oh, I'm sure books are still in there, and tastefully displayed too, I'll bet. But books just aren't the sexy items they were back in the salad days of Gutenberg.

Perhaps driven by the implacable demands of a new marketplace, the mighty minds behind the New Main chose to shred the cards from the card catalogs, throw away the wooden files housing them, and replace them with a digital system.

Now, I have used this system in other libraries. Not to put too fine a point on it, it sucks. One of the monitors is always out of order, for one thing. There's usually a line for the other three. Information retrieval takes longer: you have to go through several menus, and scroll through lines of text to find the name you want. What used to be accomplished with a simple flip of the hand now requires rudimentary typing skills.

The wonderful writer Nicholson Baker has written of the senseless destruction of card catalogs; in a recent interview with the San Francisco Examiner he said, "...we happen to be at a point where it's embarrassing for people to say that they prefer it to the on-line catalog...." (Not me, pal!) A wall around a circulation desk at the New Main has been papered with old cards from the discarded catalog. Baker calls this collage "an insult to all of the librarians whose hard work it represents." (Right on, dude!)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not nostalgic for card catalogs. I'm just pissed, that's all. It's another symptom of the Information Age Syndrome: "If it's not broke, upgrade it anyway."

I feel as though some overenthusiastic bunch of bureaucratic technophiles came striding purposefully out of a focus group, and decided to dump baby, bathwater, towels, and soap out the window. What did they replace them with? Icons of baby, bathwater, towels and soap.

Still, maybe libraries should be less like warehouses and more like the Hard Rock Cafe. Things are getting weird out there. Books need all the help they can get.

The March issue of Harper's featured an essay ("Closing the Books") by Arthur Krystal. In it, he informed us that he doesn't get the kick out of reading that he once did.

"For some reason," he wrote, "...I no longer care so much for literature...." He wrote, "These days, the newspaper, two or three magazines, and the occasional thriller are all that I can manage." (Poor kid.) He concluded that "...poets and novelists somehow know deep in their bones that their work no longer possesses the cultural resonance that writers could once take for granted...."

An essay about not reading? By reading it had I cancelled myself out? Then the April issue of Harper's featured an essay by novelist Jonathan Franzen. His piece, "Perchance to Dream" --subtitled "In the age of images, a reason to write novels" -- began with: "My despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists colony in upstate New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book."

Despair about the American novel in an artists colony? Uh-oh time. I almost stopped reading right there.

But Mr. Franzen, luckily, had worked through the issues that plagued Mr. Krystal the issue before. The issues again? "The novelist has more... to say to readers who have less...time to read." And of course there's this: "...[T]he average man or woman's entire life is...structured to avoid precisely the kinds of conflicts on which fiction...has always thrived."

Watching E! without sound on an airplane brought Franzen "an epiphany of inauthenticity". (Hey, I've been there.) It made him "hunger for the unforced emotion of a literature that isn't trying to sell me anything." (Preach it, brother!) He found the strength to go on, sort of. "The world," he concluded, "is ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again."

With manic-depressive authors like these, is it any wonder so many turn to e-mail for solace? That the culturally resonant literary forms today are message T-shirts and bumper stickers? That we're obsessed with "coded messages," at the expense of actual messages?

Unless you're reading Chris Darden's self-serving polemic, or John Grisham's latest, reading in public has almost become a shocking act, like smoking. It's a guilty pleasure, savored only by rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and mental giants.

The rest of us are hunched in front of the terminal trying to figure out a way to animate snapshots of the dog. Don't worry. The software to make Fido bark virtually will be available soon. I'm sure you can buy it at the Friends of the Library Store, on the shelf next to the Emily Dickinson baseball caps, and the Shakespeare screen saver collection.