Typical engineer, they just want to solve problems and don't care about making money. Why did he tell them the fixed machine cost? He could have started a nice side business providings these kiosks for $5k or $10k. I know O'Reilly preaches creating more value than you capture but shouldn't he captutre some value?
I assume you are not joking. He could have done more "good" by investing $1500 of his own money and given them the first one for free. Each one after that is - say - $7500. The library would be thrilled with the free one AND the dramatically lower cost. Say the library from the next town over wants one now, what should he tell them? They know it only costs $1500 and will balk at paying more yet he won't want to build them for free.
There are lots of ways to deploy your talents and other resources, and those of your employer. Some of those ways are subject to your choice, and some are subject to constraints. Maybe he didn't have $1500. He accomplished something for his employer. His employer was happy that it was done cheaply/quickly/at all.
The way budgets and head count works, it may have been easier/possible for his boss to say "use your labor/time to work on this" than to justify a specific purchase of the off the shelf product. They're rockin', right now, rather than still waiting for a budget approval that might not come through.
He works for a library, which is a front line service to the community. I imagine he gets a different personal spiritual/civic ROI doing this for the library than if he worked for Office Depot and did something similar (not that there's anything wrong with that). Direct service to the community just seems more ... service like.
"The library would be thrilled with the free one AND the dramatically lower cost"
The library would be thrilled with the free one, and tell him his company isn't an approved supplier, sorry, but if he can offer regular maintenance contracts and guarantee spares for the life of the contract, and a service level agreement, and electrical safety certification and accessibility guideline approval then they'd be happy to submit his company to the review board...
Also, he's currently in a job where he can take 15-20 days to tinker with something and people approve of it. In your situation he'd be in a job where he was continually obliged to work on maintenance and support of dozens of hacked together kiosks.
Maybe a software sales model would be a better fit here.
You give away the instructions on what hardware they need , and how to connect it ,and then you sell an integrated software that handles this.
This is also makes far easier for the library to try this because you can offer trial period/monthly software subscription , and they could reuse some hardware they have their(pc,display) , to make the initial investment relatively small, so you need a lot less bureaucratic approvals.
My wager is that he just isn't in it for the money. I doubt librarians are. I think he would be much more satisfied by helping libraries stay operable.
All things being equal, when given the choice between a 25k system and a 20k system that a business needs - they choose 20k, no matter how much of a markup it is. Value to the customer is still value even at 500% markup.
I know that a lot of people would think that, but I can tell you from personal experience that that is likely not the case. One offs, impressive or not, rarely, if ever, factor into an administrators budgetary decisions. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg is a quite common occurrence.
