Finding the information was harder. There were libraries, my town library was in the basement of the city hall building, and my local mechanic has a larger building.

If the library didn’t have it, you could hit a small book store, whose specialty was romance novels for local farm wives.

Basically, anything you would actually want would be special order, hoping the book dealer knew what you were talking about in the first place.

Oh yes of course but its way way way easier today with magnitudes more subjects covered in depth

The rewards for finding the information needed to learn were geometrically higher relative to the difficulty. It's easier to learn today; the (monetary) value of that learning is lower.