Look at this thing, it slaps. So many buttons! So many books! Such a good daylight-visible screen! So much nothing else!

This lovely lad is a Sony PRS-505 from 2007 and it pisses all over reading on your phone. It cost like $300 in 2007 (half a grand in today's money) and you can feel the let's-make-this-feel-expensive Premium Device For Rich People quality when you touch it.

A few years ago you could find these things by the bucketload on ebay for like a tenner a pop, but now that new ereaders are plastic and don't have buttons, these are starting to get more expensive.

I bought a job lot of eleven ex-display-models off eBay for fifty bucks in late 2024. Here's a Mastodon thread on replacing the battery (click on the date when it seems to end, Mastodon's threading is still broken in 2025 booo) which will have to do until I get around to writing it up here on this site.

Modern ebook files are massive because they're filled up with bullshit that tends to choke vintage ereaders, so here's a guide on how to get books onto this thing.

If you also bought a display model, here's how to get it out of demo mode and onto proper firmware.

Quick run-down that doesn't fit in the other sections:

E-Ink is the chillest display technology. It doesn't hurry for anyone and is used in only the most chill of devices. Pair that with a processor so aggressively underclocked that you only have to charge it once a month, and you can see how these devices don't belong in the same instant-response brainspace as phones or computers. They charge slow, they discharge slow, and expect it to take a sec to turn the page. Sounds infuriating aye, but within a few minutes you get into the habit of pressing the button when your eyes are at the start of the last line and then you stop noticing.

You'll need a 4gb SD card (microSD cards in SD card adapters also work). If you're living in the amazing future world of 2025 and you can't hold of a card that small (or they cost more than bigger cards because they're now specialty devices lol), I've had success with repartitioning an 8 or 16 gig card down to a single 4 gig partition. Careful: The ereader can see cards of up to 16gb, but once you've written more than four gigs of data to the card, everything goes wrong and the reader will corrupt the card. The alternative firmware PRSPlus can mount and read larger cards, albeit by taking a different approach to everyday reading - I'll have an explanation on that up soon, but for now just partition your SD card down to 4 gigs FAT32 and everything will be fine.

The best way to charge these things is via the round barrel jack. They'll charge from the mini-USB port, but very slowly (think days rather than hours) and only when plugged into a computer (if you plug into a phone charger then they'll appear to charge while actually slowly draining).

There are charging cables for the PSP (remember, the handheld PlayStation console?) that have standard USB on one end, and miniUSB/barrel jack on the other. These things, you can plug the USB side into a phone charger and use the barrel jack in the ereader just fine. An afternoon's charge is good for weeks and weeks if you're on a newish battery.