So travel is an opportunity to catch up on rare books? I travel with reading material, but it is really just to fill the idle time with something I can do sitting down. Love to sleep through the whole thing, but never seems to work out that way. I remember flying from New York to Paris overnight with the lights out, watching the minutes crawl by. Anyway, whatever circumstances allow to make minutes go by at least in realtime is welcome. Actually, popular crime novels are one favorite way. I know I can download those.

No, most of the bombs that have been detonated in Berlin and London by terrorists have not brought down entire buildings. They just kill a lot of innocent people, do a lot of property damage, and make a hell of a mess.

But skyscrapers haven't fallen down in any of the several dozen bombings in London over the last 20 years, so I guess those wacky Londoners haven't really felt the pain of terrorism yet the way we have in the US, have they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ents_in_London

...or do what some broke grad students of my acquaintance do, and either download illegally (if it's available), or pool money to buy one copy of the book, scan it, and then share it out to the group (and/or the whole internet. Usually the whole internet)

It's usually easier to find illegal e-copies of books than legal ones. Two very brief searches suggest that the Edward Said book is trivially easy to download, the Camille Paglia one not so much so (but enough sites claim to have it that you could probably find a copy.)

I'm wondering if books rank low in busy people's schedules and that's why downtime on planes becomes time for the books not read. For me, I'm quite confident I can find something in the general area of what I like to read if I want to kill time. But I sure won't wait till I'm in the air to read. There's time on mass transportation (non-airborne). There's time while waiting for my wife. There's time in the doctor's office till I get called. There's time when what's on TV just doesn't grab me. That's just the start of a pretty lengthy list, and TSA is not involved in any of these.

The answer is not to call off the dogs who want to stop flying books. The answer is to simply retire all the dogs. I think the attempt to get little exemptions diffuses the effort which should be for the cancellation of the DHS experiment. They'd still be wasting billions if they completely ignored books.

I often need to bring back to the USA, books published in Asia not normally available in North America nor on electronic media--most of them are art, architecture and cultural where the illustrations are as important as the text. There's just no substitute for an old fashioned hard copy for things like these. So the admonition to "get a Kindle" is a bit simplistic--I'm no Luddite but modern technology has its limits.

I've had TSA paw through checked luggage with books, even though I try to spread them out.

Question for the esteemed FT panel: What is TSA likely to do if I bring a BOX of books back as a piece of checked luggage--sealed up and everything? (In the past, I've only sent books back through postal systems.) Anybody have on point experience with this? Are they likely to call the Bomb Squad to take my box and blow it up "out of an abundance of caution?"

Ship them back. If they are not for reading in transit, no need in risking them on TSA. Or CBP.

Agreed. There's always a few library books around here--I go through them fast enough to always have some checked out unless I'm going to be away.

I still wouldnt spend much of my time on any issue when the real problem is simply we're all paying AND being inconvenienced by an activity that is unnecessary. The Asian wars, TSA, and the drug war, three things for which I see less and less necessity. So many ways to steal the future.

+1

I personally read a lot of novels that are written in Japanese which never make it stateside (translated or in its original form) and these aren't available for digitized downloads on iPads/Kindles.

Not everything out there is digitized.

Interesting topic. If it is true that TSA is not needed, problem solved. But as long as some people think their hijinks are worth the money, particular problems like this will be myriad.

The problem with that premise is that TSA actually IS needed. It's a foregone conclusion that air travel does actually require some sort of a consistent, national security policy.

It had been a major complaint for years prior to 9/11 that airport security was different everywhere you went. Rules changed, procedures changed, and there was no way to know what to expect at an airport you'd never visited before.

One of TSAs mandates when it was formed was to make those security procedures consistent and and logical nation-wide. In theory, TSA should be making air travel easier and more efficient by standardizing procedures throughout the US, giving air travelers a solid idea of exactly what to expect at any airport and the ability to properly prepare for getting through security, even if they are not experienced travelers.

In reality, TSA has been inconsistent due to poor training, reactionary policies, low hiring standards, draconian, nearly fascist attitudes toward the traveling public, and perhaps even corruption. Travelers have little idea what to expect, because poorly trained TSOs make things up as they go. Security is frustratingly slow, and yet has upwards of a 70% failure rate in internal tests. And policies handed down by upper management are blatant violations of the 4th Amendment, but those who actually make the laws - Congress - have given them a blank check and rubber-stamped any outrageous thing TSA puts into place, solely in the name of some illusory sense of security.

In short, TSAs existence is not the problem. Neither is the fact that TSA hates books. The real problem is that TSA is an incompetent agency that can't tell books from plastic explosives, has an institutionalized belief that anything it does is perfectly okay and legal as long as they claim it's for safety, and looks at the traveling public as criminal suspects rather than those whom they are charged with protecting.

TSA will stop hating books, and doing the other illegal and despicable things they do, when the upper management is swept clean and replaced with people who have a clear understanding of both the agency's true mandates, and the limits placed upon it by the US Constitution.

Because they're bureaucrats. All bureaucrats, in every country, by nature, are unprofessional, bloated, inefficient, incompetent, incapable of independent or critical thought, and just plain stupid.
Because they're jealous of people who can read and think independently.

...I'll post as I think of more.

And a pink slip. Private sector temps work twice as hard at half the pay (and when they screw up, they actually have to answer for it and are less hostile), why the .... is TSA hiring full timers?

I've found this horrendously expensive from several European countries.

You forgot barking :\