The slidey power switch also fails to fall out.

Normally when you take apart a thing that has button on the outside, all the buttons fall off. Not so with this, because in 2007 these were Rich People's Toys and the design and build quality is *chef's kiss*

Lesson: better to buy something that was Excellent secondhand than to spend the same money on something shit from Now

So here comes the interesting part.

The case of these things is All One Piece. It's a just-thick-enough-to-feel-expensive aluminium sleeve that doesn't get in the way and is fairly unremarkable until one day you look all around for the seam where this was bending-brake'd out of sheet metal and THERE ISN'T ONE and you go "What the... how the hell was this made?"

And then you put that question out of your mind because you're distracted by your swollen battery.

See, I should be able to just reach in and pull the whole innards out of this aluminium sleeve in one go like a magician or an overenthusiastic butcher, but that battery's all Big and it's gonna make things complicated, so we've gotta cross our fingers and do the careful wiggleypush

Don't you pop you bastard don't you pop

At this point, when you're about to expose the battery against a harsh aluminium transition, start thinking "Maybe I should be doing this outside"

but it's cold

Gotta lift up this connector flap to release the ribbon cable that connects to the case's buttons WHICH STILL HAVEN'T FALLEN OUT

Sony helpfully glued a massive transparent plastic chunk to the lifty-uppy part of the connector here

It's hard to tell what's going on in this picture but this is taken from the top of the ereader looking down, once the battery's free of the aluminium.

The whole rest of the ereader just made the sound your uncle makes after he loosens his belt after thanksgiving. It's going aaaauuuuuhhhhhhhhh that's better

you can't put out a lithium fire by the way, just reminding y'all of that

The ereader with no clothes on.

Come on, this is no surprise, you know the sort of thing people read on these things when nobody can see the cover and judge you for it in the dentist's waiting room

I bet I broke the screen wrestling with it to try to get that massive battery out

To reassemble, follow previous steps in reverse order

(for avoidance of doubt do not go back outside and get the dangerpillow and glue it back in again)

And there we have it, one perfectly working gorgeous ereader, ready for another million pages!

Continuation of ereader battery replacement thread: I replaced the battery in my own ereader too (it's the same PRS-505 but in black), and I would like to remind you that we thought about batteries very differently back in 2007.

Did you forget that in 2007 you didn't have to plug your phone in every night? Remember the INDIGNITY you felt when you bought your first colour phone or even smartphone, and it sucked so much energy that you had to turn the screen off when you weren't using it?

Anyway, I put in a new battery and charged it five days ago, read for a couple of hours every day, and can report that last night the battery display dropped from four bars to three.

So that's probably three weeks between charges aye. On a 750mAh battery smaller than a box of tic-tacs.

Look what they've stolen from us. Demand better. We deserve better.

Like seriously what was I thinking owning a vintage unwifi'd ereader and not using it, just using my phone instead

🦝 Let's settle down and have a nice read of a long book! Gee, I sure hope I don't get distracted from this book, for example by a distraction machine, much like the one that I'm holding in my hand right now, and staring at,

I only bought this for the cover, but I bid a fiver for this and two broken Android tablets and nobody else put a bid in so I got this gorgeous boy for 99 cents plus a fiver to post it.

Shame about the touchscreen, not NEARLY enough buttons on this thing, but it's a gorgeous colour and it's got that reassuring Sony Aluminium Heft to it

You could legitimately accuse me of hoarding these things

...if anybody else had bid

The UI and general Experience Of Using The Device is CONSIDERABLY worse on the touch-enabled one. Whereas on the 505 every menu item had a line on the display and a corresponding button, this 600 has its interactable parts of the screen appearing without rhyme or reason in a layout that doesn't seem very thoroughly thought out.

Honestly, touchscreens aren't really good for most things

🦝 Alright, time to distribute some of these ereaders, I'd better write a quick guide on how to make new ebooks work on vintage ereaders

🕛
🕐
🕑
🕒

🦝 Well this turned into a gibbering manifesto

Everyone who's ever bought an ebook or borrowed one legally from the library: 🐧 Oh Dan, I'm so sorry, I've been there and I know it's an awful mess

Everyone who's ever pirated an ebook: 🐴 Huh? What's the problem, it's easy

🐴 Dan, this is supposed to be a quick guide on how to read ebooks, do you really need to include so many thousand-word tangents on corporate greed

🦝 It is a hard thing to write a Bullshit Removal Guide without mentioning The Bullshit to be removed

See, the root of the problem here is that publishers hate ebooks and would rather they didn't exist at all.

Ebooks are a threat to publishers because making physical books and distributing them at scale requires a large staff, lots of very expensive equipment and a network of business relationships built up over literally centuries, whereas making ebooks and distributing them at scale requires one dipshit, a computer, six cups of tea and some muttered cursing

🦝 Thank you #gameDad, #pinePhone, #eReader (#butSpecificallyAnOldEReaderWithButtonsThatDoesNotGoOnTheInternet) for being nice fidgety little devices that can go in my pockets and bring me harmless joys throughout the day

📱 Aw thanks Dan, I didn't expect

🦝 Not you

I don't know who needs to hear this right now, with the spring rain and the blossoms on the trees and the animals being all excitable and the general Spring Energy going on, but there's a plugin for Calibre called FanFicFare that downloads stories from a variety of websites (including that one) and makes them vintage-ereader-friendly

(full list of supported sites at https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites)

Adding on to the ereader thread to say that I was strolling through eBay and saw this thing
https://www.ebay.com/itm/167504233404

And I thought, "Now that there's an aesthetic that SOMEONE on Fedi will absolutely wet their knickers over"

(I didn't buy it because I've just spent a frankly embarrassing amount of money on a red PRS-505)