Oh, and back home we have an American Airlines pilot who lives next door
to my parents in Texas. Pretty good friend of the family. He was over
for a neighborhood BBQ last time I was home and we got to talking about
the whole forbidden electronics deal. He said it's absolute nonsense.
There's no way a cell phone or an iPad can have any effect on a plane's
ability to fly. Those aircraft are designed to absorb lightning strikes
and keep flying with hardly a bump. If cell phones had even the remotest
chance to endanger a plane, they'd be as prohibited on board as guns.

Aircraft safety wasn't even the reason they were originally prohibited.
It was an FCC rule, not an FAA rule. The FCC was worried that people
trying to use cell phones that high, traveling that fast, would
overwhelm the cell towers on the ground as they bounced from one to the
other at 500+ mph. That problem has long since been solved also. Our
pilot friend told me that at this point, the real reason for it is just
a matter of keeping people under control during the flight. They don't
want people talking on them or playing Angry Birds instead of listening
to the flight attendants talk over the intercom, which means all those
people reading books and magazines should also have to put them away but
they flight crew chooses not to enforce the rule on anything but
electronics.

The book thing is a choice made by the crew/individual flight attendant.
It's not the law. Basically they're making shit up. And they're also
making shit up when they tell you that you have to turn everything off
so the plane doesn't crash.