Why my wife doesn't want an eBook device: airlines

My wife flies out and back, a two-hour flight, every six weeks. She travels light so that she can get everything into a carryon, but she always takes a couple of books and these days, for the titles she wants, it tends to be big trade paperbacks or nothing. We're trying to be frugal, but the number of Kindles I see when I ride the subway is impressive, and I was thinking that not having one might be cutting off our nose to spite our face, and her birthday is coming up.

She said, "No. It's appealing but the time I most want to read is at the start of the flight, when they don't let you use them." (Her "flight plan" is to read for a half hour, then nap.) On a two-hour flight, you are under "portable electronic device" restrictions for nearly a third of the flight. 

I'm surprised the eBook vendors haven't tried to deal with this. Since the current generation of eBooks are cell phones, it wouldn't be easy, but you'd think they could put a great big switch on them, and indicator saying "SIGNAL OFF" or "FLIGHT SAFE" or something like that. Big enough to be plainly visible from flight attendant distance, with an industry-standard appearance and symbol. They could submit RF emissions test results to the airlines, and get them approved for in-flight use. 

(By the way: my highly scientific subway/commuter rail market research is up to about a dozen Kindle sightings, two being the big ones. Kindles 12, everything else 0. No Sonys, no Nooks. While obviously it's harder to tell, I have yet to spot anyone reading a book on a laptop or cell phone. Big Kindles on the subway is interesting, as I don't think I've ever seen anyone use a laptop on the subway. I haven't seen any iPads in the wild, but I can't quite imagine using one of them on a subway either. Yes, the Kindle users were all seated).


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