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> The justification notion, I would argue that the typical user may not notice it as much as the hardcore reader.

The fact of the matter is it impacts all readers, whether they recognize it or not, and there is a reason the printing industry generally doesn't do it.

At what point would you acknowledge that maybe the large number of people who think they prefer full justification... actually prefer full justification?

I wasn't denying people's preferences. I was pointing out that it has an impact even if people don't notice the justification.

What impact is that?

A bit of google will find

https://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ragged-right-or-ju...

containing numerous links to academic papers showing lower test scores with right justification. I don't know if the author cherry picked only the articles favoring the authors opinion.

(edited to add, also try googling for the topic and "Dyslexia" where the conclusions seem fairly non-controversial and realize dyslexia is a spectrum disorder)

This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.

On the side of left justification, it looks better, there seems to be at least some scientific data it reads better, and the argument why its easier and better to read makes sense. On the side of right justification we have crickets.

Perhaps there's a patent on displaying left justified text on an ebook, and merely by ruining the product by right justification, the patent can be avoided.

> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.

If ugly line endings even make your list of "things in my life that could be going better," you're living a pretty charmed life. :)

Ah but stuffing my house with original paintings by the dutch masters would be somewhat expensive, compared to what boils down to a fairly obvious very small software bug fix. That's the truly interesting part, the ratio of effort to improve vs results of improvement.

(edit to add, its like living in an area plagued by vandalism)

+1 for that study summary, that's very interesting.

As for aesthetics, the reason for right justification in the first place is that when done correctly it looks nicer. Unfortunately it's hard to do correctly.

I sincerely doubt that there's a patent on left justified text, since that's the most obvious way to display text. I hope you were just kidding.

> As for aesthetics, the reason for right justification in the first place is that when done correctly it looks nicer.

The overall structure of the text looks nicer, but not the individual sentences.

Interesting. There certainly seems to be a bit of cherry-picking in the author's quotes. From the abstract of the first article

"Thirty-two poor readers were then tested with the same material arranged in longer lines averaging 12 words, and no disadvantage of justification was found."

So the only time that there was any evidence of poor comprehension in that study was with very short lines - 7 words per line - and with poor readers.

The third one was published in 1991, and again seems to be based on narrow lines - 4 column newspaper. And if the examples on page 29 are anything to go by, it's potentially also based on fixed space type - and I'm not going to argue with anyone about justified text with a fixed space type looking poor.

> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life

But if you don't notice it, then you presumably don't think it's ugly.

Are there a "large number of people who think they prefer full justification"? Citation required. I think most people don't think about it.

I'm confused by this -- looking through my physical books now, I'm hard-pressed to find any that aren't fully justified.

And none of them even have a dark mode! So no sense in worrying about that....

The issue isn't justification--it's justification without hyphenation. Books with justified text almost always break lines using hyphens. The Kindle doesn't do this, and that's what creates the "rivers" of white space.

Sorry, I guess I shouldn't make generalizations about the entire printing industry. There's a segment of the market where they don't do it. For other markets, not so much.

Exactly, Amazon understands and targets the majority, and they wind up very satisfied. This article lost me at "you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of people asking, begging for Amazon to change this." Ooh, hundreds! Amazon has manufactured at least 10 million kindles by now.

The point is that the product would be better for those millions of people too, they just don't realize it enough to ask. The same way people didn't realize they wanted an iPhone until Apple invented it - people were quite happy with their Blackberries.

I think Steve Jobs would say that by making a product beautiful enough to satisfy enthusiasts, you'll satisfy millions of consumers as well. They probably can't put their finger on exactly what makes it better, it just feels good.

The person who truly cares about typography, or even uploading and using their own fonts, will not buy the Kindle in the first place.

Kobo has already had those features for years now.

As it happens, I didn't buy my Kobo Aura H2O for that reason. I bought it for the microSD card slot, the frontlight, the ability to move documents to and from the device on my own terms, and the ability to read EPUBs without a pass through Calibre first. The water resistance is a nice plus.

I'm all for making the Kobo the best reading device ever, but so far, after the first 40 books, I haven't been able to come up with anything I might want to change about the hardware.

The Kobo in-device bookstore and computer sync software, on the other hand, could use some more work. Fortunately for me, I don't ever have to use either of those things to enjoy the full use of my hardware device.

Even if Amazon has 70% of the market share, they can't afford to ignore features that their remaining competitors have.

Just to chime in from the opposite angle, I, too, have a Paperwhite. I've had it for quite a while now, and it's receded to being a "once a month" thing. There's some reason that the act of reading on it just isn't as comfortable as reading a physical page. I'm not a "casual reader" when it comes to physical books at all, and I was hoping that the Kindle would help me avoid having to buy more shelf-space, but if the product is preventing "casual readership" from turning into "hardcore readership", wherever you draw those lines, it's hard to see a business reason for doing so.

I'll happily blame the justification, but there are other layout problems which also distract: image handling and inconsistent paging don't help in the slightest.

Yeah, I've never once wanted more options/features/modes for my Kindle. I honestly think any additional complication would make it worse.

Being able to keep your notes and highlights when updating a book is a feature AND makes it simpler at the same time. Choosing a warmer colour for the Paperwhite wouldn't make it more complicated either. And I wish my (first-gen) Paperwhite wouldn't complain about syncing details every.single.time. I move a book across collections (many of them samples-it's how I keep track of books that were recommended to me).