Boston prep school nixes all the books in its library, replaces them with 18 e-readers
By Laura June 
posted September 5th 2009 8:45AM
posted September 5th 2009 8:45AM
We love looking to the future here at Engadget. And while real, paper books hold a special place in our heart, we're fairly certain no one will accuse us of being Luddites for scoffing at a recent development at a Boston prep school. James Tracy, the headmaster of Cushing Academy, says that he sees books as an "outdated technology," and to that end, he's taken the drastic and expensive step of ridding the school's library of every single one of its books. Replacing the books will be a high tech "learning center," housing three flat screen televisions, laptops, 18 e-readers, and a coffee bar. The project -- which is costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 -- is one of the first of its kind. So, excuse us for our cynicism, but unless there are only 18 students at Cushing Academy, we're pretty sure the e-reader supply is going to come up short.
"why not take the segway to the store?" Made me lol, cheers
$500,000 and all they could come up with is 18 readers?
Ray Bradbury is probably screaming right now.
As a 15 year old, i find this kinda sad
This reminds me when my Alma Mater (Drake University) let the license for its radio station expire, claiming that the future of radio was on the Internet. This was all fine and dandy, except this occurred in the early 90s -- more than a full decade before its time. Administrators making "bold" decisions can affect the education of a generation of students.
This is the stupidest thing i have read in a long time. While e-book readers can be "neat" nothing is better than the real book!
Whats a book?
a physical book is an obsolete form of transmitting data
I'm an avid reader, a bibliophile, owner and lover of a couple of e-readers, and am an IT employee in a large metropolitan library system. In the kindest terms I can muster, I can say, unreservedly, that Mr. Tracy is confused and that Cushing will suffer for this decision. Has he looked at the electronic availablility of the titles he's removing from the library? And only 18 readers? Has he decided on a standard format for the ebooks: epub, pdf, mobi...?
Nothing is better then a real book, and a computer will never need more the 64k memory. Printed books will always have their place, but they are not the perfect solution to every situation. You can fit a thousand ebooks on something the size of a postage stamp, and the single copy can be shared with the entire student body over the network. They say in the article they simply don't have room for any more books, so they're changing the library into something that can be expanded instantly. We'll see how that plays out over the next couple years.
I doubt they'll get much ready done, though. Why read when they can play Halo on those big screen TVs?
Sieg Heil!! James Tracey
I was intrigued by an ebook reader on a recent flight from CLT to LAX. The guy across the aisle had one. I began to covet his wanton display of gadgety goodness as compared to my dumpy, has-been, used paperback (which cost $2). That all came to an end when the flight attendants made the customary "turn everything off" announcement and we proceeded to sit on the tarmac for 2 hours. My paperback looked a lot better open than his ebook looked closed for those 2 hours.
http://www.cushing.org/news/news.php?nid=616
Note they say "virtually bookless", I don't think they are throwing away books for fun and ones that aren't available digital would still be available. This is a school whose entire principle is future thinking. Call me crazy, it seems to make sense.
Class sizes are small, if they need to add more readers I am guessing they can come up with the budget...
This reminds of the book burning of yesteryears. What was this guy thinking? What happens when the battery on the reader fails? What happens when the reader itself fails? As mentioned in an earlier post, NOT ALL BOOKS are available for readers, and even then not on all readers. This was an extremely poor decision. Not nearly enough planning went into the transition thinking. Did they not once think of "what if". The students are the ones who will pay the price. Besides, there is just something extra special about holding a book and turning the pages. Don't be so lazy; what's next intravenous feeding to get all our nutrients? Get out and exercise your body is an imperative for life; reading is an equally important imperative for the mind. It's a little hard to read on one of these "readers" in direct sunlight. I have no problems reading a printed page in full sunlight.
"We'll have us a Book Barbeque in the yard. We'll dance around it like wild injuns. They'll see the flames for miles" -Warden Norton
you guys are all speaking on something that you are uniformed about..
I myself have multiple friends at Cushing they all have to buy their own E-Book Reader the library just holds 18.. the same way most boarding schools require laptops but still have PC's in the library for use.. $42000 a year is the average for boarding school education... don't be jealous envious whatever you want to call it because some kids have the opportunity to go to Prep schools, I myself do and I'm sick of being treated as with many others as spoiled rich kids. You quite frankly have no idea what your talking about and this article is not complete or factual.
Shame, books will still be here several million years after people leave. Ebooks are nice, and I am loving my sony 505 but it isnt the same as actually holding a book.
How am I supposed to read my 7000 year old Compendium of Magic and Macintosh on an eReader, I'm SURE that hasn't been "digitized"
its a start :D, so what's the deal with all the luddites on a tech blog 0.o
I'd quit that school in a second.. oh my god. There's the first of my nightmares, right there.
Next up, the robot apocalypse.
I was in college for four years and I literally never set foot in the campus library once. I wasn't even totally sure where it was, it was just so irrelevant. I think they're wasting their money by replacing the books at all, they might as well just tear the building down and put all their electronic content on a website instead.
I think this guy is minutes of way from a pink slip. "Former headmaster loses job, demoted to teacher".
What a shithead....
I'm actually a graduate from the aforementioned prep school. Personally I like the feel of flipping the pages and reading the actual book as what it is. It feels... better. Since I have graduated from Cushing (class of 2004) there has been quite a big change in how the system works. I really hope this current headmaster is not going to try to replace all the books.. I know the old headmaster Willard Lampe wouldn't.
A prelude of things to come. The printed word can be digitized better than music or video. Books are so entrenched into our history and the lack of a good ebook reader are the reasons why it is taken this long to start knocking down the "paper barrier". ALL books that get published or sold in the US are stored in the LIbrary of Congress and MUST be accompanied by a digital version now.
I have an ebook reader and it CAN replace a book and it is enjoyable to read on.
The last bastion of paper books will be large format books with heavy color and lots of diagrams or formulas. That is the only real barrier that is left. EBook readers to tackle this format will be soon available (2-4 years out). For now, any good sized computer screen will work but it is a uncomfortable way to "read" a book.
Get used to it folks!
e-books are turning the tangible into the intangible. Just like the music industry, the publishing industry is going to want us to basically pay them rent. We are moving away from a society of ownership. The kindle reader is the perfect example. You give up owning the physical book, pay the same amount for the electronic version, plus you have to buy a reader, and Amazon has the right to take the book away and the publisher has the right to say what you can and can't do with the book you purchased. Oh crap! and can you take your old e-books down to your local used book reseller and sell them? Ah..no.
The technology is neato and I'd love to have an e-book reader on my own terms, but people are all-too ready to give up their freedoms for the next big thing.
Wait, so there are 18 e-readers? If the figure of 12 per class on average is accurate, then you would really be screwed if several classes have reports. Good luck putting books with giant maps on digital format, or figuring out whether or not to digitize different versions of the same book. But, I'm sure they know what they're doing - that 500K probably includes several people sitting in a dark room transcribing books that don't exist yet in digital format.
Oh well, I never really used the school library for research work unless I left an English book at home and needed a replacement. Even in those cases, I would've been screwed had the school dumped all its books for a few digital ones.
I guess the funniest thing in all this is that picture on one of the academics page of the girl typing on the typewriter. So much for digital age, eh?
Maybe the should of run a pilot program where they added the new technology to their existing library.
Then if all was going well, gradually wean the system off books and add more computers and Ebook readers.
This sounds like a real debockle.
It's terrible idea. no thing can top books. You don't need electricity to read them, neither a screen. just some light, and spectacles if you have sight problem.
There are only 18 students who read.
so...were you a business major?
Duuuhhhhh. Wer'd all da bookx go?
books are not an "outdated technolgy"
tomo
This is the funniest post I have read on Engadget all year! Nice...what's this bloke huffin'?
The fall of humanity is nigh
keyboard is to touchscreen keyboard as ebook readers are to books
So silly. Books are real and so am I. Until I can fly or
eat a microchip that gives me all the information in a book- just looking
at a screen to study a book is just bad for your very real eyes.
boston is expensive to live in, and this headmaster is stupid to do such a thing.
wow, this kinda sucks! There is something awesome about a library filled full of old books, and going ALL electronic just seems to cut the heart out of a place. Bad move, and one the school will probably regret.
What a ridiculous idea and a horrible decision. You can't get the same feel from a screen as you do a book, and I don't think it ever will.
Cushing Academy Is a very high end school were the kids that go there money is not an issue. Kids from famous parents go there at times under false names to protect their identities.
E-books and such are the future for all schools just based on the fact that the cost of a book for a school would be much cheaper in digital form then made from paper and could easily be updated with corrections. The younger kids are always carrying way to much weight then they should be in their backpacks so a simple e-book type of device would eliminate that. By schools having the parents pay for their kids e-reader or notebook then schools would be able to cut a huge expense off their budgets.
that pic just says "oh what have I done?"
It's clear many of you didn't read the whole article on the website for the school. They're not eliminating all of the books in the library. Sounds to me like they're eliminating all of the books that they can readily get in digital format.
Similarly, the 18 ebook readers they're getting for $12k are likely that expensive because it will cost nearly a $1k to put all of those books on each ebook reader. Not unlike if you were to fill your iPod with 10,000 legally purchased songs.
Maybe the flat panel televisions will be multi-touch panels a la Perceptive Pixel so that you can telestrate ebooks and study in small workgroups together.
Finally, they indicated that when they looked into how many books were actually checked out of the library, there were only 48 books checked out and 30 of them were children's books. Simply put, floor space at a place like that is expensive and if it doesn't make efficient use of the space, it should go.
Kinda funny to see the hypocrisy of people "conversing" on the computer, rather that in person, about what a crime it is to rob children of the experience of reading from a paper book. Have any of you ripped your CDs and put them into portable mp3 players? Well, your missing the "feel" of reading liner notes while lying in the floor listening to your new CD.
Whatever, people. I'm sure that this school did a long term cost analysis and a present use case analysis and found that they are dedicating tons of money and valuable real estate to products that are not used much. I did this in my living room with my CDs and DVDs. I put them all on a hard drive and I'm more efficient.
Part of the expense of a library is the building costs to house additional books. A few ScanSnap scanners and a great bulk paper cutter can make quick work of a lot of those books in a day.
e-Readers are here... ok... but just as the TV didn't kill Radio, and Internet didn't kill the TV... eReaders will NEVER kill the Books... as Bill Gates once said... books don't need a electricity, Books don't need nothing but a human eye who reads them... they're the perfect technology!!!
Wow! Bunch of ignorant morons here. Has Engadget really fallen this far? I mean, I knew Digg, and Gizmodo were complete shit, but to see a bunch of morons that can't RTFA is deplorable. It's funny, actually, how you all pathetically pander on about how these children are deprived and how they won't know how it feels to hold a real book; when, in reality, it's really your brain that's deprived of oxygen and any and all rational thought.
It's also hilariously sad how you all mindlessly banter on about how they can't do "proper" research. First off, not all of these kids are working on a worthless liberal-arts degree (waste of tuition). Second off, digital media makes it FAR easier to research specific or general facts or ideas. Lastly, if you bothered to do "proper" research instead of stroking your insignificant ego you'd realize that the class sizes are small, and most of these kids' parents probably make more in a year than you ever will in your shallow, meager excuse for an existence.
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Cushing is not "Boston", unless Boston is 1.5 hours wide...... come on, say it with me: Central Mass.....
as long as they don't tell us they did this in part to go 'green'...