The usual approach to model reduction for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) is to construct a linear space $V_n$ which approximates well the solution manifold $mathcal{M}$ consisting of all solutions $u(y)$ with $y$ the vector of parameters. This linear reduced model $V_n$ is then used for various tasks such as building an online forward solver for the PDE or estimating parameters from data observations. It is well understood in other problems of numerical computation that nonlinear methods such as adaptive approximation, $n$-term approximation, and certain tree-based methods may provide improved numerical efficiency. For model reduction, a nonlinear method would replace the linear space $V_n$ by a nonlinear space $Sigma_n$. This idea has already been suggested in recent papers on model reduction where the parameter domain is decomposed into a finite number of cells and a linear space of low dimension is assigned to each cell. Up to this point, little is known in terms of performance guarantees for such a nonlinear strategy. Moreover, most numerical experiments for nonlinear model reduction use a parameter dimension of only one or two. In this work, a step is made towards a more cohesive theory for nonlinear model reduction. Framing these methods in the general setting of library approximation allows us to give a first comparison of their performance with those of standard linear approximation for any general compact set. We then turn to the study these methods for solution manifolds of parametrized elliptic PDEs. We study a very specific example of library approximation where the parameter domain is split into a finite number $N$ of rectangular cells and where different reduced affine spaces of dimension $m$ are assigned to each cell. The performance of this nonlinear procedure is analyzed from the viewpoint of accuracy of approximation versus $m$ and $N$.
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