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,

Anyway look what just turned up at my house lol

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

The case has a built-in flip-out popup booklight! Featuring some incredibly crappy 2008-era icy blue LEDs, boo

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