Buying the littleun an ereader for Christmas and
🦝 Whoa what happened to the good Sony ereaders? You used to be able to snag them for ten or fifteen bucks all day long, now they're like forty or fifty plus another fifteen for a new battery, what gives?
YEARS AGO:
🦊 Johnson, those page-turn buttons cost a dollar more than the touchscreen, get rid of them
🐛 b-b-b-but sir, nobody will buy an ereader without buttons, there are thousands on ebay and the ones from 2007 read books just as well as the new ones
🦊 Don't worry Johnson, give it time and the old ereaders will all get sold and people will forget
🦝 Ooh what's that on eBay, eleven broken Sony PRS-505 ereaders for fifty bucks shipped? DON'T MIND IF I DO LOL
🦝 Why simply buy a thing when for the same money you can buy eleven broken ones
Sony: 🦊 Johnson, the PRS-505 reads ebooks really well, what've you got cooked up for its successor
🐛 Uh, sir... it already reads ebooks? It has nice buttons and feels great in the hands? I'm not sure we uh
🦊 Johnson
🦊🚬
🦊🌬️
🦊 Are you telling me we've made a perfectly adequate machine that does exactly the job it's intended to do, no more and no less? Are you telling me people will have no reason to buy the 600-series?
🐛 s-sorry sir
🦊 At least tell me the buttons wear out.
🐛 Sir we put on two sets of page turn buttons
🦊 Shut. It. Down.
Meanwhile, at the Roomba factory
🦊 Jimson, good work on the 500 series, what's next for the 600's?
🐛 We're adding wifi, sir!
🦊
🦊 Jimson are you telling me that the 500 series cleans peoples' floors adequately?
🦝 It's a little weird that "500 series got the job done just fine and turned out to be a little too resilient" happened twice
Well I got 11 broken Sony PRS-505 ereaders for fifty bucks off eBay.
Seven of them aren't broken at all, they just want new batteries. Two have minor read-around-able screen damage. Two have busted screens or maybe busted ribbon cables.
As you can see, a couple of these lads are bulging a bit haha
Just look at these beautiful boys
This lad wants nowt. Turned over 200 pages on a 5-minute charge.
So there's reasons why I'm buying ereaders from The Past instead of a modern one:
* It's made of METAL and it feels EXPENSIVE and FANCY, and also like it'll last longer than five minutes
* It has BUTTONS - there's a big circular two-directional page-turn button on the bottom left, and when that wears out, there's MORE page turn buttons on the mid right. There's also ten buttons running down the right side of the screen - when you're in the menus, there'll be ten things to a menu, and you just press the button for the thing you want. Also there's a dedicated button to step through the font sizes. BUTTONS GALORE.
* No wifi, no internet, no accounts, no DRM, no buying a book and then getting it stolen back off you by amazon. You put books on it two ways, either by plugging it into your computer or popping out the memory card and plugging that in instead. Either way, it shows up as a removable drive, and you literally just drag-and-drop your epubs in your file manager exactly the same way you'd copy files to a flash drive. It's SO UNCOMPLICATED.
The successor to this thing was the PRS-700, my spouse has gone through three of them because they put a touchscreen on it and consequently put way less effort into the page-turn buttons, and she wore them out within a year each
They're not easily repaired either, IIRC it's not like one button per input or even a matrix, it's each button has a different value resistor attached and they all share the same wire like crap car stereo steering wheel controls
Anyway just like when I'm trying to fix a whole arcade, each one now has a bit of blue painter's tape giving it a number and note about what it needs. Each one got charged on the wall for five minutes and a boot attempted (except for the two with obviously-broken screens and the one that was all swollen up).
Most didn't get through the whole boot sequence and all they need are new batteries, a couple can be used straight-up as-is.
I figure I'll approach this the same way I fix a whole arcade, make the worst ones the best ones until they're all pretty good
Alright, number 11's the worst that I have parts to fix right now, let's do a Dan Fixes eReaders thread.
Start by taking out the four screws on the back of the ereader. They're smaller than you'll find in a laptop, very tiny, like watch screws. Take out the first one, then go downstairs for your glasses and then take out the second.
At this point you'll realise you need more light, so go ahead and log into Home Assistant and...
Once you've got four screws out there's a hidden Fifth Screw in the butt
Once all the screws are out, use a spudger to pry the butt off the ereader, getting ready to catch the volume rocker as it falls out.
Except it doesn't fall out! Sony put a captive volume rocker in this thing! Neat!
Hot tip: never use a flathead screwdriver to pry stuff, always use a plastic spudger or you'll chew up the plastic or paint no matter how careful you are and it'll look a bloody mess.
With the butt meat removed, the holes are exposed. There are three more tiny Philips screws inside, these ones are longer with a coarser thread, put them somewhere separate to the others.
With those three screws out, the case is free to flex.
Oh my GOD how swollen-up is this lithium battery
am i about to die
The cat appears, pet her until she goes away
With the cat satisfied, we can begin removing the top of the ereader, same thing, spudge it with your spudger until it spudges off
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
These two clippydoodads gotta come out, they're held in weakly with an adhesive and will come out fairly easily
Here's what they look like Out
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
A five-second flourish becomes a fifteen-minute session of sweating and cursing and hoping that the screen and various fragile electronic parts can withstand being mushed up HARD between an aluminium case and a VERY ANGRY BATTERY
Wiggle so gently and carefully
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
With the ribbon cable detached we're free to continue bringing out the ereader's innards. Any minute now we'll expose the battery
holy SHIT
LOOK AT THIS ANGRY BOY
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
See if you puncture a lithium battery you run a good chance of shorting it internally, these are basically made the same way as capacitors or jam roly poly's, you get dissimilar foils and spread some electrolyte jam on them and fold them over and over each other to make a pouch battery like this or roll them up to make a round battery like an 18650, you stick something in there then the foils touch and all the stored energy gets un-stored, it sometimes goes BANG or WHOOMPH or SPRRRRRKKKKRRRFSSSSHHHH but you can't put it out, it shoots out very hot flames and water makes it angrier, anyway this is glued in place so you gotta take your spudger and just jam it in there underneath, just stab it, lever it, wiggle it, take hold of it in your fingers and yank on it, just really go to town
Replacement battery on the left looking normal and respectable, on the right is the one I just levered out with a spudger, it's not happy about it
Carry the battery by its tail and tell it well if you're going to be like THAT then YOU can go OUTSIDE
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
Haha I didn't break the screen!
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!
Folk have been asking and yeah I do intend to post some of these to fedifolks but I only bought three replacement batteries so it might have to wait til new year