School Library Goes Completely Digital

Posted on November 10, 2009

NPR reports that a school in Ashburnham has renovated its library to be completely digital. All the hardcover and paperback books are gone.

An elite boarding school in Ashburnham, Mass., just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on renovating its library. But Cushing Academy wasn't just redoing its walls and carpets. The school is getting rid of the actual, physical books in favor of going digital.
And the move - thought to be the first of its kind in the country - is worrying some librarians and book lovers.

The school used to have a collection of 20,000 books but it will now have access to millions of digital books.

Carlisle says the library is trading its 20,000-volume collection for a database of millions of digital books. All students can read any of the books, either through the 68 Amazon Kindles cycling around campus or on the laptop that each of the school's 450 students is provided.

NPR says there are critics of the school's futuristic maneuver but the critics are worrying Headmaster James Tracy. Tracy says, "If I look outside my window, and I see my student reading Chaucer under a tree, it is utterly immaterial to me whether they're doing so by way of a Kindle or by way of a paperback."