Typical: 5 weeks after I wrote a review of long-term experiences with my eBook Reader in which I said, “the hardware has worked flawlessly”, I hit a problem last week, so much so I thought I was going to have to send it back to Sony for repair.

The problems started when I ran the battery completely flat for the first time ever. I charged it the next day and, having connected it to my PC in work for about 5 hours, found that it was still flat. I unplugged it and tried again, and it started to take the charge. For the next couple of days, I noticed that the battery seemed to be running down unusually fast: I was finding that I needed to charge it every day. I didn’t notice the cause of this until Thursday: I couldn’t turn the device off [or more specifically put it into standby mode].

I googled this and couldn’t find any articles on people having a similar problem. Some people have had issues with the on/off button detaching, but nothing sounding similar to what I was seeing. I dived back into the manual and found the power off functionality in the top level menu. I never really figured this as a long term fix, but we’re going on holidays in just over two weeks and I was starting to think about the likelihood of a round trip to a repair centre, so I was looking for a sticking plaster. This worked for about a day, but the device became completely unresponsive on Friday night.

I’d tried a few remedies. I had recently uploaded my first PDF content, so thinking that that might be corrupt in some way I deleted it. When that didn’t work I tried deleting everything, using the top level menu item. Either this takes longer than I had patience for [an hour] or else didn’t work at all [my money is on the latter]. Soft resetting, with the recessed button on the back in combination with the on/off button failed as well, and eventually locked the device up completely. At this point I assumed that it was irretrievable, as it was completely unresponsive. I gave it another charge the following morning, and while I was waiting, I tried googling for a hard reset key combination [I had previously googled just for ‘reset’, not explicitly a ‘hard reset’]. This, finally, worked. Unplugging the reader from the USB prompted a reboot. While this was happening, I held down the bookmark and volume key, which prompted the full reset, restoring the device to factory settings. This requires the re-authorisation of the ePub account with Adobe.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a pretty nasty way for the device to fail. The recovery process was effective, but not an awful lot of use if the device crashes when you are lying on a beach somewhere. It remains to be seen if it’s the start of a pattern or a one-off.