I had an internet connection at my apartment, I just lacked a smartphone or laptop.

I think we're talking past each other a little. When I mentioned places without internet coverage, I mean rural places where you just can't get internet. If you live in the city, you can always get online if you really want it, even by borrowing from a friend. Compare that to places outside the big metropolitan cities, where information access was impossible before the internet, because they would at most have a tiny library with little to offer. The internet was an enormous revolution in rural communities, I lived to see it. That was in the 90s, and now the shadow libraries have made physical libraries obsolete.

Shadow libraries and eInk readers have done a thousand times more to give people access to books and information, than all physical libraries combined. That's why I don't think there's any future for physical libraries.

Your purpose. Many others use them for different purposes.

I think if you ask anybody what a library is for, they'll say for reading and borrowing books. The money being plowed into libraries could be used for subsidizing e-readers and that would give better information access to millions of people, instead of a few thousand of people living in the right place to enjoy good physical libraries.

The American Library Association says each library decides it's own purpose.

And the politicians deciding the budgets decide if they want to pay for that.

Many, such as the city library near me, are choosing to become community centers attempting to provide a third place. I'd argue this has value the internet cannot replace.

Completely agree, but they shouldn't really be called libraries by that point.