Hasta La Gadget!

The much-touted and extremely controversial story of the text-to-speech function of Amazon’s Kindle 2 could fill a very large e-book. The tale continues to get longer still, as at least one major publisher — Random House — has thrown the dreaded “kill switch” on about 40 of its titles, including authors such as Toni Morrison, and, ironically, Stephen King (who you will remember was part of the Kindle 2’s launch). Random House disabled the function without much fanfare, or an official announcement, but you can be sure this isn’t the final chapter.