That's true, assuming you want a relatively small subset of all books. Once you want something recent, or obscure, or a current textbook, you usually can't find it for anywhere near that amount, if you can find it for sale at all.

I hope you can appreciate how fortunate you are.

Though 4 Euros ($4.50) is less than half what I pay for most books I want on Amazon.

It would be very expensive for me to feed my book-reading habit like that. I couldn't afford it without libraries.

It's nice that you can afford to spend money on books, but we need a solution for everyone else, especially if we agree that books are a good thing for society.

Recently there was that op-ed in Forbes that said we don't need libraries because we have Amazon: https://qz.com/1334123/forbes-deleted-an-op-ed-arguing-that-... -- Was such a disaster that Forbes limped away from it by deleting it.

Of course there are people who need libraries and I support funding them even if they're mostly empty. But I think a sizeable fraction of the people who used to go to libraries but don't do so anymore are like me and just buy the books they want to read used rather than go to the library.