I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day.

Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.

Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan.

I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.

Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere, to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.