Justified text looks pretty, but why does that matter? Most books are bought to be read, not to sit there admiring the right edge justification. There's even

Justified text looks pretty, but why does that matter? Most books are bought to be read, not to sit there admiring the right edge justification. There's even a plausible theory that justified text is bad for readability (perhaps because the brain loses that hint of which line is which). I haven't seen a lot of studies[1] replicating it, but I don't see any studies taking the other side. There's also the problem that it alters the inter-word spacing, which might also reduce readability since the brain can't rely on consistent word spacing. I sympathize if you're conditioned to be annoyed every time you see an unjustified right column, but that's not a reason to recommend justified text. Publishers (and authors, when they're considering text style details) need to understand that ebook publishing isn't the same as publishing print books. For print, decisions about font and styling have to be made, because otherwise there's no text. For an ebook, unless it's a picture book or textbook with careful design[2] or some other kind of book where layout is the primary concern and readability is secondary, no features of the main style of text should be hardcoded. It needs to be left up to the ebook reader, and whatever defaults plus user customization it has. [1] e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.1986.tb00491.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.1986.tb00491.x [2] These kinds of books, where publisher-dictated styling makes sense, shouldn't even be published as epubs; it often ends up as a disaster no matter how hard they try. They should publish the books as pdfs only.