My 20-year-old Sony Reader PRS-500 still works fine!

I was an ebook-reader nerd long before most people knew what an ebook reader was.

I followed every bit of news about Sony’s upcoming Reader and waited and waited for it to be released. When I heard my local Borders had finally gotten them, I traveled all the way across town to see it.

I walked up to the counter and said, “Hi, I’m looking for the Sony book reader.” The clerk looked confused and asked, “You mean a book about Sony?” I explained that it was an ereading device made by Sony. She still had no clue what I was talking about and offered to search for a book about it. lol

Luckily, another employee overheard us and pointed toward a tiny display in the far back corner. They’d apparently gotten the Readers in the day before.

So I found the display and picked one up, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. There was already text on the screen, so I assumed it was a fake display model with a printed sheet under the glass. Then I accidentally pressed the page button. The words faded away and a completely different page appeared.

It had been turned on the whole time!!

I’d never seen an E Ink screen before, and I couldn’t believe how much it looked like an actual printed page!

The background looked light, the letters were crisp, and there was none of the glare I was used to from reading on LCD screens.

I turned the page two more times, put it down, and immediately found someone who could grab me one from the back so I could buy.

I’ve never replaced the screen or battery, which looks like it would be very difficult to do.

The paint has worn away in spots where I held it so much, but the original pleather cover has also survived.

It was my main reader until the first Kindle arrived a year later.

Today, the page turns feel slow, it offers only three text sizes, and changing sizes can force it to sit there and reformat the book. I don’t really know how I managed to read on it every day for a year, but I guess at the time I seemed like magic!! lol

I may try to read a short story on it or something for old times sake.

SPECS:

The PRS-500 was Sony’s first Reader released in the United States. It reached stores in the fall of 2006, more than a year before Amazon introduced the Kindle.

Six-inch, 600-by-800 E Ink screen with four shades of gray, about 64 MB of usable internal storage, SD and Memory Stick expansion, and an advertised battery life of roughly 7,500 page turns.

It weighed just under nine ounces and loaded books from a computer rather than through Wi-Fi.

Sony replaced it with the faster PRS-505 in 2007, then closed its North American Reader Store in 2014 and eventually left the consumer e-reader business.