I’ve been reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal exclusively on my Amazon Kindle for a few months (except for weekends as I could not bear to give up the printed Sunday Times).    Since I now have a daily commute of an hour by train it is infinitely more practical to use a tablet to read a newspaper.   True like many New Yorkers I have developed and honed my commuter oragami skills being able to read a broadside in a space smaller than a telephone booth.   There are increasingly fewer of my fellow commuters reading physical newspapers with each passing day.

Overall it’s a pretty good experience to read the newspaper on a tablet but I am having difficulty in understanding why there are things in the printed newspaper that are not included in the tablet edition.  For example, every issue of the NY Times and Wall Street Journal has a page dedicated to the weather.   Being a bit of a weather geek I like to see the temperature and weather conditions in various cities around the world – both for places I’ve been and places I’d like to visit.   But neither tablet edition has a weather page or map.   As far as I have been able to find, unless there is some type of weather catastrophe, the NY Times and Wall Street Journal tablet editions (which include two of the three largest circulation newspapers in the United States) don’t feel it is worth including.   Why would a digital edition have less than the printed one?

In addition the Wall Street Journal, which discontinued the printing of full stock market tables several years ago (this was apparently to save on ink and paper), does not include stock prices, ANY stock prices, in the tablet edition.   In case you are wondering I pay for my digital Wall Street Journal delivered on my Kindle.

While the Wall Street Journal does not include many sports stories (for years it did not have any sports stories aside from human interest sports stories), the New York Times has a daily sports section (a good one) and one can find all the written articles on the tablet version just as they are in the printed version.   But there are rarely overall league standings included for any of the four major sports, no lists of league leading scorers in the various categories and worst of all no box scores for any of the sports.   As a baseball fan not having the box scores available is a big sacrifice.    Yes I can find the information elsewhere but why should that be necessary?

So why do the tablet editions offer less content than the printed versions?   I am paying full price for everything, or so I thought.  Maybe the tablet editions are about to make me an offer to get more content if I fork over more money for my digital edition?     Uh-oh I think I just answered my own question.    What do you think the reasons are?