Urban planners of the 1920s just knew that average Americans and Europeans would abandon their homes and yards for sleek, efficient high-rise apartment towers with shared gardens. In the 1960s, set designers on the TV series ‘Batman” envisioned a computer so powerful that its blinking lights covered half the Batcave. And now, administrators at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham are getting rid of the 144-year-old prep school’s books and are embracing a digital future. A library with 20,000 books will give way to a $500,000 ‘learning center” outfitted with digital readers, laptop study carrels, flat-panel TVs, and even a sophisticated coffee shop. ‘When I look at books,” the school’s headmaster told a Globe reporter, ‘I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” Maybe. It’s obvious, at least in the world of periodicals, that electronic screens are rapidly assuming a role once played by printed paper alone. But the long-term shape of the Internet-era news and publishing industries has yet to be settled, and the precise route that progress takes is hard to predict. In the 1980s, plenty of forward-thinking schools got stuck with Betamaxes, or with computer labs full of TRS-80s and Commodore 64s. For some reason, […]