2 Weeks of Wall Street Journal iPading - Changing Reading Affordances

For the past two weeks, I have shifted my daily reading of The Wall Street Journal to the iPAD.  I wanted to experiment how reading on this device impacted my style and approach -- as well as explore the "affordances" that iPAD newspaper editions might contain.

A few immediate changes:

• It is more social! Perhaps it is new, but I find myself often handing an article in the digital Journal to a friend or colleague to scan in a coffee shop or my office - triggering a dialgoue.
• I send more articles! Every day, I find myself sending 2 to 4 articles via the embedded email function to people - to extend the conversation.
• I clip and save more! I rarely saved a paper article and even when reading in the laptop edition, my saving was minimal.  Now, I find myself clipping and accessing more content.
• I check embedded stock prices. As I read articles about public companies, I am doing way more real time checking of stock prices.
• I scan all articles with section based table of contents and then drill down relative to my interest.  Net impact, I read more and more efficiently.

I am quite intrigued to see how the format of iPAD newspapers will change.  I would love to have these additional affordances:

• More Video and Audio.
• Social Dialogues with Defined Colleagues on Key Articles -- Including Colleague Rating of Interest.
• Links to 3D Manipulable Graphic Images and Charts.
• Drill Down to e-Learning Modules on Key Concepts.

I have no problem paying the monthly fee for this format of the Journal.  It is making my reading more personal, more context rich and more convenient.   And, I am reading updated editions of the Journal that are way more current than the ones that are slipped under my door at a hotel while on the road.