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!

Got some folk coming round for a back porch hangout so I put the battery in the grill while I figure out what to do with it

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.