All those people staring at their tablets on airplanes, the buttons to their Economist app conspicuously displayed—are they more likely to spend the flight actually reading theEconomist, or slingshotting irate avians into green pig heads?

Or maybe they’re reading about the latest coup in Africa, or checking out the hot new sex tip from Cosmopolitan, or the knee-slappingest pet jokes compiled by Reader’s Digest; or playing one of those tablet pianos like in the iPad mini commercials? The numbers are in from the Alliance for Audited Media, the Nielsen-esque giant that crunches numbers for the publishing industry, but they raise more questions than they answer.