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)

Come on fess up, two minutes after I post it here it's suddenly sold lol

Whichever one of y'all snagged that up, you better do a thread on it

In other news, Ectaco seems like a cool company? They make ebook readers (with page turn buttons - less than they used to it seems, but there's still at least a page-forward and page-back button and those're the important ones) and translation devices and their website looks like it was made in 2003, and not in a bad way either.

Here's one of their translators. You can't tell from the picture but it's on the bigger end of phone-sized.

Damn I wish this company made phones. I'd have a phone like that.

Looking through Ectaco's website and having a little yearning sigh moment of "Ohhhh, I wanna go and work at that company..."

VTech (the toy company) was the other company in the last decade or so I've felt that way about (I was just that impressed with their offline kiddy smartwatch that it made me go "Oh, I'd vibe with these people.").

(which is high praise 'cause I'm rabidly self-employed)

🦝: Taking time to organize thousands of ebooks and compress them such that they can all fit in a low-power offline ereader from 2007

🐰 is this a trauma response after the storm that cut off everyone's power for half a week

🦝 What? Pfft no

🐰 OK fair enough

🦝 *whispering* it's a trauma response to eeeeeverythiiiii

"Those cheap ones off aliexpress might not get software updates" FFS SOFTWARE UPDATES

for BOOKS

wtf lad, like the update from when we went from scrolls to edge binding?!

Reading daily on a 2007 ereader has reminded me just how tiny text is and I don't think Modern Kids even know about file sizes

one black-and-white page of manga shrunk to fit this ereader's screen takes up as much space as a novella

you can fit fifteen novels in one second of video

a 4gb SD card of books would probably have me completely sorted out for reading material until it's time to die of old

Kids don't know about file sizes and hard drives and stuff because they never got, like we did, the leap from floppy disks to CD-ROMs.

The presenter on the telly would hold up the big thick phone book and say 🐹 isn't it remarkable that all this information can fit on one plastic square. But there's a new technology coming in! Inside this new plastic circle, you can fit ALL THIS!

And there'd be this massive overflowing pile of phone books, stack them into an armchair and sit in it, more than you could read in a decade, all in this one shiny miracle circle.

Tell kids about that today and they'll say what's a floppy disk, what's a CD-ROM, what's a file, what's a phone book, what's a telly and what's information

🐀 Dad's what's information

🦝 It's like misinformation but there's less of it and it's true

I don't think we've had a massive shift like that in the last few decades. Like, now you can get multi-terabyte hard drives for cheap and that's normal, but they kinda grew in size and dropped in price pretty smoothly, that's nothing like the jump from floppies to CDs in the 90's. We went from a megabyte and a half to 700 megs in one big jump just like that.

Then DVDs were like eight gigs and okay fine but that's only ten times as much, big whoop y'know. Blu-ray, 50 gigs on a dual layer, big deal, I lived through a 400x jump

Like, imagine if tomorrow someone put out a 400 terabyte hard drive for the same price as a 1tb one today

@Doomed_Daniel @ifixcoinops And, more cynically, because software has been explicitly designed to make local storage less convenient, to justify selling more cloud storage.

There is a good argument that this makes backup and multi-device synchronization easier for non-technical users, but this problem honestly isn't *that* hard to solve.

@growlph @ifixcoinops
Sure, it's enshittification enabled by technical improvements all around.

Software needs massively more power than it did to do basically the same thing because that power is there.
Widespread internet connections that are always on enabled more predatory licensing (even for software that still runs locally).
As you said, vendors try to lock you into their "cloud", possible because of internet speed.
Same for streaming services