No doubt the digital revolution offers enormous boons to the life of the mind. But jettisoning books means giving up the one thing they do best, which is to preserve the word. It took a few hundred years, but the book's Terms of Service are second to none. Reading the Globe story on Cushing's Folly reminded me of Alex Roman's haunting short film featuring another prep school library—the one designed by Louis Kahn for Phillips Exeter Academy. It's a moody celebration of a building—but what's most striking is that the library is empty. As a tool and a work of human craft, the book has a lot of life left in it. But if it fails as a meme and a commodity, will it die out altogether? Until today I didn't believe so.
