"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.
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.