Book now: German readers get extra baggage allowance for holiday reading

Having just returned from holiday in France, where thanks to overloading we were 7kg over easyJet’s 20kg weight limit and forced to undertake a rapid repack, here is an initiative I would love to see the UK’s airlines adopt. Publishing Perspectives has reported on the German book trade’s Buch an Bord (Book on Board) campaign with Condor airlines: all passengers displaying a Buch an Bord sticker collected from their local bookseller will be allowed an extra kilo of weight in their hand luggage, just for books.

Alexander Skipis, managing director of the German Booksellers and Publishers Association, tells me that the campaign has been running for a month already, and “has encountered a huge and very positive response. All the 5,000 bookstores in Germany were equipped with the campaign stickers and the bigger part of them are participating.”

Our own overloading was partially down to books, in particular the whoppers that are Joe Hill’s The Fireman (my husband’s) and the new Jilly Cooper (mine). I do almost all of my reading on an e-reader these days, and I’d not thought I’d missed holding a book in my hands at all, the benefits of being able to download whatever I fancied reading at a moment’s notice outweighing the pleasure of a paper copy. This year, though, very patchy broadband meant that, once I’d finished Cooper, I was largely forced to put down the Kindle and mine the shelves of paperbacks in the place we were staying (one of life’s great joys, discovering the books people have left behind on holiday). Maeve Binchy, Deborah Moggach, Dick Francis and Catherine Alliott filled my evenings, and very restful it was too. I’d not realised before quite how well short stories (Moggach’s in particular were great) fit into life with small children – I even got some reading done during the day.

I’m not sure the Buch an Bord initiative will put paid to the advantages of an e-reader. (I drew the line at the Alan Titchmarshes I could have read, and was thankful I’d downloaded a few books before I’d left the UK.) But if, in Skipis’s words, it “encourage[s] people to discover reading and to visit a bookstore before going on holiday”, then so much the better. What would you fill your 1kg extra allowance with?