The Federal Aviation Administration has given Alaska Airlines permission for its pilots to trade in about 25 pounds of required in-flight reading material—including operating manuals, checklists and logs—for an iPad loaded up with the same content in digital form. The airline hopes to eventually transition other required documentation like charts to tablets, which would remove about 60 pounds of weight from each flight, require less work for pilots to update and organize, and potentially reduce injuries caused by hoisting heavy flight bags. The New York Times says that other airline are carrying out similar experiments. American Airlines now has permission to...

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Publishers Weekly reports that Barnes & Noble has made 50 positions redundant—even executive positions, such as VP of merchandising Rob Wietrak. “A B&N spokesperson stressed that the company is reallocating resources to areas that are expanding, such as its digital operations,” Jim Millot writes, “but had no comment on how duties of the departed buyers and others would be divided up.” Certainly it’s hardly a surprise that financially-troubled B&N is reorganizing, and eliminating executive positions will also eliminate executive salaries. Exactly what this will mean for B&N’s “digital operations,” such as e-books, remains to be seen, however. (Found...

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