Y'know, this is the kinda morning where I look out my window at a half-barren patch of trees and something just feels correct. I love familiarity. I think part of the reason I still blog about shit, even when no one else does, is because it's my little way to keep the mundanity of the Web I grew up on alive. I've been reading a lot about old Minecraft versions—perhaps I'll spend the day drawing and playing that.
I own two second generation Kindles, neither of which work. They both have flat batteries. I've been wanting to have an e-book reader around for dinking with and maybe even reading more, and while I know e-book readers have gotten fancier since the late 2000s (apparently Kindles can now take ePub files :omegalul:), I'm not a big fan of e-waste, and they worked perfectly fine otherwise, so I'm trying not to buy a new one if I can help it.
Instead, I ordered a new battery. And everything went wrong.
Getting into the thing was a chore. The first step is to take the plastic bit on the back off so you can work the metal backing off and gain access to the battery. A lot of places will tell you to wedge a spudger between the metal and plastic bits, but they're flush on both my models and I didn't want to scuff up the outsides if I could help it. The real way to do it is to press your thumbs on both sides of the Kindle logo, slide them up gently onto the plastic bit, push down, and then push the plastic piece off.
The plastic bit came off easy, but being an idiot, I completely wore down the soft plastic spudger that came with the new battery trying to get the clips holding the metal bit on. (In fairness to me, this spudger really was a piece of shit. You could wear it down scraping it along a piece of drywall.) I then noticed I took out the wrong screws. Even when I removed the correct ones, though, I still couldn't make any progress with those clips! Eventually, I got the metal backing off using a small flathead screwdriver to push the clips down, because nothing else could fit in there and I was scuffing up both my hand and all the cards in my wallet thinking one of them would do the trick.
I mentioned that I own two of these units—one belonged to my older sister back when the Kindle 2 was new, and the other, I ordered used because that one's battery had already eaten shit. I opened up the first one, I guess out of curiosity if there was anything still on it, and discovered the original battery had swelled pretty dramatically. This is what they in the trade call a "spicy pillow", where a lithium-ion battery swells to the point of being convex, like a pillow. A mildly dangerous one. In my case, I can actually see what I think are glue strings where the outer cover of the battery was attached to the metal chassis.
This is where I discovered I ordered the wrong sized battery! The one you can easily find on Amazon is for a Kindle 3, not a Kindle 2, and Cammy didn't check his model numbers. While I was able to return the battery within a few hours for a full refund (Kohl's dropoffs sure are quick!), looking around, I discovered that the Kindle 2 batteries are so outdated, you can only get them as made-to-order parts with a three week to potentially six week turnaround time. I was able to get free shipping on the order, and it was roughly the same cost as the Kindle 3 battery I bought, so price isn't the issue. It's having to wait yet longer that's the issue, and with it being that far out, it's not out of the question that my order will just get canceled outright at some point. I've had it happen.
Worst case scenario, I'll just recycle these at the Staples I worked at (free electronics recycling to try and get people into the store, woo!) and order a later gen used Kindle or something. The new ones are much fancier with backlit screens, bigger batteries, and can actually buy books from Amazon—apparently these older ones are blacklisted from receiving downloads if attached to an Amazon account. I've never really looked at where else I can get e-books from outside of Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and toying with getting my own or friends' stories onto it, which probably doesn't help my inability to stick with the habit.
That said, I definitely think I could make use of a Kindle in the same way I use Pandora, as a way to try out books before I order proper copies of them. That appeals to me. I'll keep you posted.
