Business Traveller

Cathay Pacific launch in-flight audio books

Peter Myers

Nov 30, 2011 11:12 UTC

At a travel industry dinner a couple of months ago, I was sitting next to the boss of a large book publisher. During the course of the meal, we agreed that airlines’ movie/music/games-centric entertainment offering is an injustice to the bookish.

Why not beam e-books onto passengers’ personal devices, we wondered. Or, even better, stock audio books.

So it was nice to see Cathay Pacific Airways announce today that a collection of audio books will be on all their Audio and Video on Demand-equipped medium- and long-haul flights from December. This adds to their expansive library of 100 movies, over 500 TV programmes, 888 music CDs, 22 radio channels and programmes in nine languages.

Audio books will be in English, but the airline tells me that should they prove popular they will consider launching titles in other languages.