My librarian friends talk a lot these days about the changing roles that libraries play in their communities. There are certainly a lot of people who have less need for them purely as a place to borrow books and look up reference materials. But that's not all that libraries are, and for those and other services libraries are particularly valuable to people who
aren't so fortunate.
I'm not even just talking about the range of community events that libraries often host: my kindergarten-aged daughter has enjoyed going to our local library for weekend read-along events for years, for instance, and I've hosted a local science outreach event there, and they're the location for a local arts festival every fall, and they're a natural space for a variety of community meetings. Some libraries even run their own maker spaces.
But it can be easy for highly educated and/or reasonably well-off people to forget how much of a lifeline a library can be. A lot of librarians I know talk about how library computer services are the only way for some of the poorer people in their communities to hunt for jobs, for example, because they don't have reliable internet access at home. (That's getting better as more and more people do have computers in their pockets, but there's a long way to go.) Kids growing up in families that are struggling financially don't have shelves and shelves of books to learn from at home: a library can do wonders to fill that gap if the family makes a habit of it. And librarians themselves can do wonders to help people sort through the oceans of available information to find the most useful and trustworthy sources: that's their specialized expertise, and it's not becoming less important as we gain increasing access to far larger and more comprehensive sources. Their training can be useful to anyone, but it's especially helpful to be able to turn to a librarian if (e.g.) you haven't gone through a high quality college program that's taught you the basics of that expertise yourself.
There's a lot more to say, and yes, libraries are going to need to transform in fascinating ways in the future. But there really does seem to be a role for something akin to libraries in our society. (And, as an aside, you'll rarely find a group of people more fervently dedicated to issues like privacy and freedom of information than librarians. That's valuable, too.)