Not exactly what I was thinking of, because that's more on a local system than at web scale. Something else, I'm sure it's related though, kinda like a crowd crush?
What's the term for when a failing service causes the users of said service to use it more to complain about it failing? Because it sure seems like that's happening to some extent.
Assuming the computer talks over a standard protocol like serial or parallel, I don't see how it wouldn't be fairly straightforward to move it to a newer machine. Might even be able to run it on a virtual machine for better compatibility.
I had a coworker that I tried to help out, but he barely knew some common programming terms like what a type was, or how he had to declare something beforehand in order to use it. We never really found out why he didn't know these things because he was so softspoken and shut down at any attempt to understand why he was having trouble. I don't talk to him much anymore due to some team restructuring, but other coworkers still see the same so I don't know if he can be helped honestly.
The only reason I made a blog and a post was because it was something to learn with and get some of that sweet sweet Hacker News front page traffic. It did work by the way.
I made an actual robot to automate hi alching for me a year or two ago, to work around the whole "no software" thing. It just pressed the mouse button for over a month every ~0.6 seconds. Totally worth it. Just had to check on it every 24 hours when the client timed itself out.
Bare HTML/CSS/JS. I did move to Netlify from Github Pages for privacy reasons (and Github Pages for private repos costs money). Works on every device as well!
Use one of the solutions listed below, but you HAVE to do sorting on the fly. You need to have places to put books and sort them by some general genres and you HAVE to throw out books that aren't worth the time due to damage or any other reason a book would be deemed a recyclable. With that many books, a proper library style cataloging system may be your best bet.
That being said, if you do want to do image comparison for covers, books without covers usually have a copyright page with most of the info on it. Use that to determine what a book is when the other method fails. Throwing together some cheap bookshelves with plywood and 2x4's will greatly help with the finding part, but while scanning use some big bins to do a rough sort.
And I can't stress enough you HAVE to throw out books. It's clear that there's a space issue and if he's willing to get them for free but has a hard time getting rid of them, that's hoarder behavior, not just eccentricity.