In my little corner of Germany, the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) metro area, the Nürnberg city library (Stadtsbibliothek) charges about 10 EUR/year for a library card, and Volksbücherei Fürth is 18 EUR/yr for adults, with various discounts for students and public assistance recipients - the latter is a foundation.

But a card for the Erlangen-Nürnberg Universitätsbibliothek, and if you're willing to wait for delivery, every other academic library in Bavaria, was something on the order of 5 EUR, and required absolutely no connection with the university other than having an address in the area.

For whatever good it does, I did sort of think about the fact this was an over generalization, when writing this, but it's also absolutely the way I thought about it at the time. I do actually remember having a more limited but similar feeling visiting a library in I think Bath, UK which felt similar in quality to the libraries in truly tiny towns growing up in Ohio. It was free, but the services offered and number of books was way worse than I'd expect from a similarly sized US city especially one that seemed sort of well to do. Meanwhile I think a lot of people in the US have a mostly fair impression of Western European countries investing a lot into their public sectors, but for better or worse my very scientific impression is that the US invests a lot more into libraries.

I didn't mean to imply that all libraries charge in Europe though. I knew that wasn't true, I just would have assumed before that all libraries in western Europe were free

European countries are more similar to each other than they are to the US, or to most countries in Asia or Africa. They’re also more similar to each other than the US is to any other country in the Americas besides Canada. Those reasons are why we sometimes talk about them as one cluster, even those of us who know that the various countries aren’t identical.

Same thing in Spain, many libraries with no cost whatsoever.