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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 .15%, 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," says junior Caitlin Forest.

So the venerable boarding school west of Boston — the first in the USA 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.

AT COLLEGES: Technology 'catching up' with students
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 a school has placed its students' intellectual lives so fully into the hands of a few online publishers and makers of electronic devices.

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 called Cushing Cyber Cafe, but students quickly nicknamed the spot "12K Cafe" after its $12,000 espresso machine.

An angry backlash

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 and even compared 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.' "

Actually, he says, he has hired more librarians to help students navigate the electronic stacks and tell "what is valuable information or reliable from what is junk."

He concedes that the $12,000 coffeemaker has become a distraction, but he says the real idea behind the cafe was to create "a new commons, a new agora, where people in a convivial setting exchange ideas and socially interact around ideas with culture and literature at their fingertips."

Many book-loving bloggers gave Tracy grief for telling the Globe, "When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books." But he says he was talking about books' usefulness for research, not for pleasure reading.

"If I look out the window and I see a student reading Chaucer, to me it's utterly immaterial whether it's a paperback or a Kindle. I'm just glad that they're reading Chaucer."