Link to September 4 boston.com article, "Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books."Excerpt: This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’
"Media is not a zero sum game," says Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. "Just because a new medium arrives doesn't mean an old medium dies out. We still have writing in an age of word processing, we still have reading in an age of video. That will continue, but the nature of reading will change as it has changed all along." (From "In So Many Words: How Reading Reshapes the Reading Habit", by Rebecca Piirto Heath, American Demographics, March 1997.)
The article then goes on to note: After Gutenberg's invention of the moveable-type printing press in 1455, some predicted it would mean the end of handwritten text, writes Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading. Instead, the opposite happened. The printing press brought vast quantities of uniform, inexpensive reading material to the masses. As the printed word spread in the 16th century, more people learned to read and write, and the calligraphic arts flourished.
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