by Mark H. Sklarow, Executive Director, Independent Educational Consultants Association

Cushing Academy, a wonderful day and boarding school in the western suburbs of Boston, made news last month when it announced that its library would be transformed into a learning center without books. As the school’s Head has told the media, when he looks at books he sees an outdated medium, just as parchment scrolls gave way to books, he sees the evolution to electronic readers and computer screens as inevitable and welcomes the change. To be sure, replacing the library’s 20,000 paper volumes with maybe a half-million digital books can open the doors for more reading options, broader research, and provides the added benefit of promoting a sustainable campus.

As one who has believed in the importance of exposing students to as wide a range of points of view as possible, as someone who believes that students should have options of literature beyond British and American classics, and as someone who has embraced new communications models (I do blog daily, after all), I should be enthusiastic about the change. And intellectually, I embrace it. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to visit Cushing and speak to the students in a few years to learn first-hand how the change has played out. I applaud the school’s leaders for being brave enough to take this first step on an untraveled path.

Oh, but my heart has overcome my head. I love the feel and smell of books. I love the sound a book makes when you crack the binding. Despite what my mother taught me about using a bookmark, I love to turn the corner of a page, or if reading a book that someone has read before me, I love seeing where they dog-eared the page…was it the same spot as me? Did they stop just before some plot twist and fall asleep not knowing the book was about to change direction when they picked it up in the morning?

I’m old enough to remember taking a bus to the trolley to visit the regional library, where I could go through stacks of old magazines in conducting research. I may have been researching a paper on some current event and exploring its roots, but I loved looking at the ads, the other articles, getting a feel for the time period and the public mood. Could I get that from an electronic copy of the article? I doubt it.

But more than any of that, I remember biking to my neighborhood library as a kid, clutching my library card. I could arrive when the library opened on a Saturday at 8:00 a.m. and stay until hunger took over hours later. I’d wander the stacks and marvel at how many books I still hadn’t had a chance to read; grab a book I never heard of, and discover the joys of Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine or Henry Reed’s Big Show (that’s Hank to his friends). As I grew up, I transitioned to the adult stacks and discovered new authors and tore through their books. I remember discovering a biography of Ben Franklin that has led to lifelong fascination. Would I have discovered that biography by searching a digital database? I hope so, but I suspect not.

I mourn the disappearance of books, just as I mourn the disappearance of newspapers (I remember when “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin.”). I’m willing to see where the Cushing experiment takes us, but how I will miss being able to sit at a table, surrounded by thousands of books on subjects I never heard of, with plots I’ve yet to experience, with authors waiting to be discovered.