The fact that it's a book about typography may mean the requirements are a little different, because I personally (and likely many others) don't really pay attention to such things.
When I wrote my PhD thesis, I made some effort to follow good typography practices (I thought that since I had devoted so many hours to the work, it would make sense to devote some time to make it look as good as possible... and I guess it was also a way of procrastinating from writing content) :)
Various people who "don't pay attention" told me that it caught their attention for being really nice visually, even if they couldn't pinpoint the concrete differences that led to that.