ASHBURNHAM, Mass. — Cushing Academy is the very model of a modern New England boarding school.

Clock tower? Check.
Maples and meandering footpaths? Check.
Flags representing the 193 home countries of its alumni? Check.
But in the past few years, the old library was in danger of becoming a relic. Its 20,000-book collection was barely used, administrators say. Spot checks last year found that, on some days, fewer than 30 books, or about 0.15 percent, circulated. And it was becoming rather lonely down there.
“I’d come in here during a free period. There’d be no one in here,” junior Caitlin Forest says.
So the venerable boarding school west of Boston - the first in the United States to admit both boys and girls — last summer undertook another first: It began getting rid of most of the library’s books. In their place: a fully digital collection.
Library watchers say it could be the first school library, public or private, to forsake ink-and-paper in favor of e-books. It also represents the first time that a school has placed its students’ intellectual lives so fully into the hands of a few online publishers and electronic-device makers.
Researching the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919? Use your laptop (handed out to students on financial aid) or a library PC to access the 13 databases to which Cushing now subscribes.
Reading “David Copperfield” in English class? A librarian will gladly download it onto one of 65 Kindle handheld electronic book readers from Amazon.com, which circulate like library books.
Three big-screen TVs now greet visitors at the entrance and the old circulation desk is now a coffee bar. Officially it’s Cushing Cyber Cafe, but students quickly nicknamed the spot “12K Cafe” after its $12,000 espresso machine.
A backlash erupts
Naturally, the blogosphere flipped.
After reading about the plan last month in the Boston Globe, bloggers and commenters worldwide have called headmaster Jim Tracy a snob, a spendthrift and a book burner, comparing him to Adolf Hitler. One commenter on the blog parentdish.com urged: “Save the books, fire the instigator of the book-burning. Let Hitler stay dead.”
All very curious when you meet Tracy, a soft-spoken, painfully polite guy who’s a bit bewildered that so few people get it: His tiny school’s collection is growing from 20,000 books to millions.
“It was really to save libraries five, 10, 15 years down the road,” he says. “What the students are telling us is, `We’re not using the print books. You can keep giving them to us, but they’re just going to collect dust.’ So we’re saying, `Let’s be honest: Let’s give them the best electronic information available.’ ”
Tom Corbett, Cushing’s director of media and academic technology, says the new research system “does a much better job than this,” pointing to the remaining 10,000 books on shelves, which will be gone by next September. Donated books will stay — as will a group of Cushing-related books and a tiny children’s collection, kept for staff members’ kids.
New Kindles run from $200 to $500, but Corbett says he can purchase many e-titles much more cheaply than traditional books. Often he pays just $5 apiece, so for the price of a $30 hardback, he now orders six e-books.
A model for other schools?
Critics see the value — and inevitability — of increasing libraries’ digital collections but say that to remove virtually all printed materials is a mistake.
“This is not necessarily a model for other school libraries,” says American Library Association president Camila Alire. “It’s a private prep school, it’s a residential campus, and they also have the funds to do things like this.”
Actually, Tracy says, that’s the point: The school can afford it, so why shouldn’t it? He wants to share what he learns with other schools — and is partnering with Oxford University to offer any materials it develops as a free, open-source guide.
Cassandra Barnett, president of the American Association of School Librarians, says most reference materials are going online, but she wonders how Cushing librarians will attract kids to books they might not otherwise seek out. “I can’t display a whole bunch of Kindles with the covers of books.”
Most students love the new library, but a few remain skeptical.
Asher Chase, 16, a junior, says anyone who thinks digital books are the future should read a digital book. He remembers his English class last year being assigned Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on their laptops.
Taking notes on the text? Forget it. “It was terrible: `Shade, file, edit, highlight.’ We were like, `Wow, reading books on computers is awful.’ ”
Gaby Skok, 18, a senior, simply can’t believe that Tracy has let flickering TV monitors, a la George Orwell’s “1984,” invade the library.
“Dr. Tracy, I love him, I respect him,” she says. “But has he read a dystopian novel?”