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