The issue of books aside, you should check out youtube tutorials regarding virtual machines. I recommend the software VMware workstation free edition for virtualization.Technically savvy people can do those sorts of things. A majority of the population think their cellphone is a computer.
I also use a lot of older apps, many of them with serial cracks. Windows updates search for some of them, and disables them. I know this because with Windows XP, the update .log file can be opened with notepad, and most of the text is in plain English. It appeared to me that certain companies pay a fee to Microsoft to search for an disable unregistered software during the update process.
I have a stockpile of computers with XP operating system, (five laptops and two towers), and only one of the tower models has ever been connected to the Internet after the XP operating system was installed. As far as I can tell, the disabling of unregistered software began around February, 2014. The XP computers than my geek sets up have Service packs 1, 2 and 3, but no updates after that.
Now reading a giant text file is not a great experience so maybe you want a more convient format like epub or PDF which require software but digital formats are well known and there are many software old and new that can read them.
That's true today, but 20, 50, 100 years from now, who knows? At some point, the average Joe might have to pay a fee to read anything, or may have to make an application to request to read something in particular that would not interest the majority. I don't see life in the future getting better, and I expect that it will be a lot worse.
In your case, virtual machines would solve problems that you did not know you even had and it offers security, performance, and ease of disaster recovery that can not be matched with an old physical computer.