I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people.
When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).
If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.
Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.
When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).
If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.
Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.