I respect the spirit you’re going for, but FYI, Libby/Overdrive are private-equity owned and just as exploitative (if not more so) than the major publishers were.

Libby does not give libraries an unlimited license for digital books, but rather makes them pay what they would for a physical book, and allows them to loan out the digital copy a relatively small number of times (usually around ~4-5 IIRC) under the guise that a physical book would have been irreparably degraded after that amount of use. There’s a stream of billions of dollars being moved from non-consenting taxpayers going right to a monopolistic gatekeeper.

If we’re talking physical books, libraries are definitely still great for that, but I find that the vast majority of the time I look to check if they have a specific book I’m after, there are zero physical copies anywhere in the system, and all the digital “copies” are already “checked out”. E.g., I went looking for a copy of PKD’s Valis last week, and my options were: library audiobook (vomit), wait two weeks for a “checked out” digital copy from the library (vomit), buy from Amazon (vomit), or sail the seas.

So no, that’s a shitty substitute — libraries have been co-opted into an extractive, for-profit system and utterly perverted into a shell of what they were in the 20th century.