Ragged right is not somehow inferior to full justified. It automatically creates rythm that keeps you engaged. There is reason most graphic profesionals prefer look of ragged right.
It's also pretty hard to have quality full justified text. To keep spaces consistent you need hyphenation and advanced typography algorythms like latex microtype package and paragraph composer like the one in Indesign. And it will still not be enough. You will need to have experienced human make adjustments - fix hyphenation and fiddle with settings. When you see full justified done well there is someone putting quite bit of effort so it looks well.
The reason it is so hard is that if you take somehow optimal length of 70 characters you will have only about 10 spaces on line add to that limit of 2-3 consecutive hyphenations at the end of lines and few longer words will get you to pretty tight spots. It's a balacne battle. Sure increase number of characters on line and then it will look even but long lines make things much harder to read and its the worst problem because you will not be able to catch next line.
Most often you will see justified text full of rivers or crazy big differences between space widths - both more distracting than ragged right. For some reason some people think its more grand and authorative but it is quite dogmatic view.
The main reason why it's used in books is that it saves space. On 400 page book it can make difference. But the publishers employ dedicated expert who does this work and goes page by page so everything is in order.
It's also pretty hard to have quality full justified text. To keep spaces consistent you need hyphenation and advanced typography algorythms like latex microtype package and paragraph composer like the one in Indesign. And it will still not be enough. You will need to have experienced human make adjustments - fix hyphenation and fiddle with settings. When you see full justified done well there is someone putting quite bit of effort so it looks well.
The reason it is so hard is that if you take somehow optimal length of 70 characters you will have only about 10 spaces on line add to that limit of 2-3 consecutive hyphenations at the end of lines and few longer words will get you to pretty tight spots. It's a balacne battle. Sure increase number of characters on line and then it will look even but long lines make things much harder to read and its the worst problem because you will not be able to catch next line.
Most often you will see justified text full of rivers or crazy big differences between space widths - both more distracting than ragged right. For some reason some people think its more grand and authorative but it is quite dogmatic view.
The main reason why it's used in books is that it saves space. On 400 page book it can make difference. But the publishers employ dedicated expert who does this work and goes page by page so everything is in order.