One thing I love about the libraries at least in Toronto, is that many of them have private collections, and some of them are entirely one subject or genre. I

One thing I love about the libraries at least in Toronto, is that many of them have private collections, and some of them are entirely one subject or genre. I have a deep interest in magic and mentalism, and found a library here that has books on the subject that are so old they're not even in modern English (or German as is the case for some of the books they have). Luckily the illustrations are detailed and verbose. Also in Toronto we have the Reference Library which is a gold mine, and probably is even more archive.org-like than most libraries. I honed my Assembly Language skills there in the 90's, and did enormous amounts of research on Artificial Life and that sort of thing. They have some of the best stacks, so you have to use the CueCat or whatever they call it to summon up all the good stuff they dare not leave on the shelves. Nowadays a lot of material is available on the Internet. Yet most books are so very much better than a current blog or online "tutorial." Even the older books. So there is that. PS: I always buy the e-books that I like. Paper copies if they're available, since I prefer them. You can tell a great book by how dog-eared it gets over time. You don't get that metric with ebooks.