The average in-flight magazine is a bulky enough affair in isolation, but have you ever considered the payload drain 500 of them on a single flight creates?

With that number of magazines weighing in at about a tonne, it’s short wonder Emirates has decided to do away with them in favour of an electronic version instead.

According to Emirates’ president Tim Clark, the decision to ban all onboard paper will lighten the aircraft by a tonne. “It’s 2kg per seat and 500 seats, a worthwhile saving,” he says. “We are doing it because of fuel prices and the environment. The printed matter will be replaced by content shown on the aircraft’s seat-back TVs.”

Reading an electronic version of the in-flight magazine would probably be more entertaining than enduring the “over-edited-for-general-consumption” in-flight movies that are on offer anyway.