Drones are getting better and will continue so getting, which will remarkably lower shipping costs and times. Consumers will benefit from this, as will the firm best able to take advantage of this, Amazon. But it also opens up a new model: libraries for everything.
The main costs of using a library are (1) taxes to purchase and curate the books, which are vastly cheaper than owning it yourself because utilization rates are higher and (2) actually going to the library, picking up the book, heading home. (2) is the big driver here. (Personally, even though I am someone with an intense draw to “library smell,” I’ve checked out astronomically more books since shifting mostly over to Libby, which brings these costs down to zero.)
Books are well-suited to the library model because they are consumed once and but then remain useful to someone else thereafer. Specialized tools are similar, and many libraries already offer these. But this could be expanded to Libby- or Sci-Hub-like levels with easy delivery, increasing access and utilization rates for an increasing range of specialized tools and other physical objects, data already being efficiently provided by shadow libraries. As the ease of individual shipment costs fall, the range of options (think interlibrary loans) rises and cost to users falls. This also means that as these continue the range of things that can be economically managed by libraries expands - if library systems have the funds an initiative to expand in this way. Especially for tools outside of users’ area of expertise, expert chatbots could help identify what a particular user needs, perhaps connecting them remotely to a specialized human librarian once a specific enough area of need is identified.
At the limit, one could imagine most of the economy functioning this way, with each person having a few permanent fixtures they keep for convience (like a desk set-up) or vanity (like a well-stocked private bookshelf) or stuff that everyone wants at the same time (kitschy holiday bunting around December.) Have a date night? Rent the outfits and some fancy candle holders and mood lights and what have you; pay just for the food and wine.
IRL libraries would still serve a useful community function in such a world; this would be an expansion of their functions, not a reduction of their traditional ones.
I suspect a lot of things could already work on this level, except the actual issue with this model is initial capital. For instance, fancy clothes rental for dates and parties is a p big niche in my town. Libraries almost universally have some sort of setup to make aquisition of books cheaper than in consumer-facing stores, but as we already see with digital libraries, the publishers offering these deals take the difficulty and annoyance of using a library into account when offering them. If you make libraries more accessible, they want closer to consumer-facing prices. (Or even higher)