Unless your life savings is invested in rare volumes, books are just dead trees.
But name, address, birthdate, and potentially even the last four digits of your SSN, all information that potentially held by the library as "ID" is enough information to get money out of your bank over the phone.
They've come up with policies to not release information because information has value to people, and identity theft is real. It caused a slow-down in this case that amounted to about 10 minutes. Not bad if you ask me.
I guess I should distinguish between the physical artifact of a book, which is indeed "dead trees", and the symbol expressed by the book, which is an idea that springs from the creative mind of a person. If that is not more important to you than money then we don't have much common ground to discuss the relevance of libraries.