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GIZMO: Case controversies plague the Kindle (with M-Edge to the rescue!) and taunt Apple's iPad 2 "secrecy. " Also, a cautionary tale about tech magazine cover headlines. KINDLE KLUNK-UP: Just a month ago, Amazon.com was bragging about the huge success of its third-generation Kindle, the best-selling item in company history. Now, and only under duress, has the online giant come clean (kinda) about problems with this e-reader when it's installed in a $34.99, made-for-Kindle carrying case.

SEATTLE - Amazon.com launched a new private-sale website Tuesday, becoming the latest online retailer to offer limited-time deals on designer clothing. The new site, called MyHabit.com, promises discounts of high-end brands beginning daily at 9 a.m. on the West Coast. On Tuesday, for example, MyHabit offered a Doo.Ri women's halter dress for $398, down from $995, and Saurette girl's sundresses for under $50, rather than the regular $79-and-up price tag, giving shoppers until Friday morning to make a purchase.

MEADOWLARK LEMON. The very name makes you smile. For those too young to remember, Lemon is "The Clown Prince of Basketball," best known for his 25-plus-year career with the Harlem Globetrotters. But he has been with other teams and still finds time to play 60 to 80 games a year with the Meadowlark Lemon Harlem All-Stars. To date, he's played 16,125 consecutive games. Take that Cal Ripken. "I'm ageless," Meadowlark said with a laugh. He's in town to promote his new book, "Trust Your Next Shot," which covers everything from how to live to what to eat. "It's more than just a title," he explained.

Tired of being outsold by online retailers, earthbound merchants have convinced legislatures in five states to force Web-based sellers to collect and remit sales taxes. Twenty others are working on similar laws. Now, it's time for New Jersey to join the trend and stop forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in Web-derived tax revenue that it can use to meet its budget while protecting local businesses. Online retailers have an unfair advantage over florists, appliance stores, clothiers, music and gift shops, and other local businesses.

Margie Tannenbaum keeps a pile of free paperbacks, three green lawn chairs, and a knee-high evergreen tree outside her used-book store on East High Street to goad the skeptics. The downtown, she said, is on its way back. Opened just two months ago with fewer than 2,000 books, Tannenbaum's Evergreen Bookstore has doubled its inventory, increased sales, and, most important, staked its claim as a pioneer in the borough's quest to infuse new life into its dilapidated downtown.

It has always been my policy to avoid making snap judgments about others. That's what I tried to do with the recent rash of cyberterrorism on the Internet. Reading about people who spend their days and nights obsessing over how to zing and zap people in cyberspace, I tried to understand why. What is the point? What do hackers get out of this besides a few laughs and the promise of three hots and a cot? These computer aficionados have used their considerable computing skills to bring Internet businesses and news organizations - among them CNN, Amazon.

Major booksellers are being assailed by leaders of Jewish groups and thousands of customers for stocking a notorious work of anti-Semitism. The book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, appeared in Europe in the early 20th century and was widely used to stir violence against Jews in czarist Russia and elsewhere. It purports to be the secret minutes of a late-19th century meeting of Zionists plotting to seize control of the world. Historians later exposed it as a fraud. Two small publishers have reissued the book, and online booksellers have begun stocking the slim volume, which has no known author or copyright.

SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft Corp. and top on-line retailer Amazon.com Inc. yesterday announced they are teaming up to sell digital books, entering what an industry expert called uncharted terrain. "It's not clear when and how this will pay off," said Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "The natural analogy is to look at the music industry, and the difficult time that digital and nondigital firms are having trying to figure out how to manage it. " Under the agreement, Amazon would use a customized version of Microsoft's Reader software for downloading and displaying text on a personal computer or handheld device, the companies said.

Yum. An 11-year fast has done little to sate America's appetite for Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, who made his return to the bookstores Tuesday. The 1.3 million copies of Thomas Harris' Hannibal (Delacorte, $27.95) that were released will, presumably, be devoured on a beach near you sometime this summer. Hannibal is the sequel to 1988's The Silence of the Lambs, which became 1991's five-Oscar-award-winning, $130 million-grossing, Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins-starring thriller.

Businesses are launching Web sites as quickly as possible, hoping that a dot-com address will help them grab a share of a market expected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2003. But all too many of the companies eager for Internet success fail, largely because they have no inkling of what a Web site should look like, what it should contain, or how it should treat potential customers, two experts who have studied e-commerce warned at a Comdex seminar. Comdex, the computer industry's annual dog and pony show, is celebrating its 20th anniversary here this year.