Kindle Academy? Prep school ditches library for e-readers

Here's a story to warm Jeff Bezos' heart. An elite prep school in New England is getting rid of its traditional library of 20,000 books and replacing it with an entirely digital infrastructure -- including 18 electronic readers from Amazon.com and Sony. Cushing Academy's headmaster envisions "a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books," and calls it "a model for the 21st-century school," the Boston Globe reports.

The 144-year-old school, in Ashburnham, Mass., has given away half of its library collection and is spending nearly half a million dollars on a new digital center that includes flat-screen TVs and laptop-friendly study carrels. Cushing spent $10,000 on the Kindles and Sony readers, which will be filled with study material. The center will also feature a coffee shop with a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

Amazon has been pushing its Kindle DX with the college crowd, so it's interesting to see Kindles making headway at the high school level. Of course, it's not every school that can shell out $10,000 for electronic readers, so Cushing Academy may be an exception, for now anyway.

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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