This reminds me of a memorable trip to east coast & NYC when DS was 11/12. Most of the trip was about looking at colleges for my DD. DS spend the entire trip reading HP from cover to cover. Almost all my pictures of him from that trip have him plopped down in some odd place with one of the HP books.

What I did to keep our luggage to a minimum was bought him used paperback copies of the books. I bought a few as we went along even though we owned an entire hardback set and then some. (It's helped it was HP he was reading because it was easy to find.) And sent some home with DH as wasn't along for the whole trip. I bought DS one of those small 'string' backpacks' and he would carry his current book everywhere. It was cute...

If HP had been available as an ebook I would have gone that route. Sounds like time to get the kids who is traveling with tons of books an e-book of some sort.

P.S. As to eating at dinner. We all read the newspaper during breakfast/lunch. Dinner reading matter isn't allowed. There were exceptions like when my kids were younger and were were eating out where there would be a lot of waiting time or grownup talk. And then reading was only for the waiting time, not eating time.