You're getting downvoted to hell for this, I assume the excuse people are giving themselves to do this is that it is mostly irrelevant to the story - but the story is an irrelevant story. The only things interesting about it are incidental.

And your thought was my first thought. It's as if the soup kitchens were shut down because somebody had stolen all of the prayer beads, meaning that none of the homeless could pray before they ate.

Libraries have now simply become official copyright access points. I lived in libraries my entire childhood. I remember in my teens being both depressed and excited that my local library was going to close down for six months to be gutted and remodeled. I was soon the one that was gutted when I found out that after the remodel, the library would have a 20% smaller capacity for books. I had to conclude that the remodel was mostly so it would look better in photographs, people would get kickbacks, and people would get resume-padding.

Libraries have been retconned into necessary public spaces but in that case, the books are just an excuse. Get rid of the excuse and consciously create necessary public spaces. I've literally heard their existence justified by the fact that homeless people clog them up and sleep in them, which has been one of the major reasons for declines in library use imo. Just take care of homeless people.

I'd even rank access to a librarian, especially a research librarian, as of higher value than a building full of books. AI has forced us to take a different approach to intellectual property, whether we're going to consciously do that in the public interest and design systems that will protect the positives that we attribute to copyright, or whether we're going to do that through inaction by allowing the wealthiest people in the world to rent human knowledge back to us without having paid a dime for it.

I'd prefer that we govern, but if we're going to go the passive route of insisting that nothing a rich man does is a crime, we can continue to settle it through piracy. Either way, libraries are cooked.

Queens Public library under ransomware attack e-borrowing suspended