Studies have shown that well-compressed lossy audio is nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This is certainly true for me. I can sometimes pick out the compressed version if I know the track well and can look for specific details, but generally I'm absolutely not consciously aware of any compression artifacts.
Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
And yet...
I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences. I believe there may be parallels with lossy vs. lossless compression when it comes to music, and with many other experiences as well -- you may not be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with cheap butter and grass-fed butter in an A/B test, but might you enjoy one cookie more than the other anyway?
But the question is do they enjoy the book with excellent typography because they're told it's excellent or can they perceive the higher excellence and derive enjoyment thereof.
In the Battle of Naboo in the Phantom Menace (2001, 115m budget,) you see a CGI battle between a million zillion CGI robots and CGI aliens with CGI force fields, etc. It's a proud display of state-of-the-art CGI capability, circa 2001.
To this day, when you watch Jurassic Park (1993, 65m budget,) you're looking at a fucking dinosaur.
Great typography is like great special effects in a movie (most of the time,)— the viewer shouldn't realize it's there. "Good typography is invisible" is the most commonly repeated maxim for typographers. Typography is good if it's readable, legible, all elements on the page serve their purpose without needing to be labelled or puzzled over, and the most noticeable thing on the page is the information being conveyed. (Postmodernism challenged this in some interesting ways but for most practical purposes, this still holds true.) A designer might notice the typeface choice, paper choice, tracking, leading, margins, kerning, paragraph 'rag,' line length/column width element hierarchy and placement. The user probably won't notice the greater reading speed, lessened eye fatigue, fewer incidents of losing their place, easier scanning for pertinent bits, and things like that. But it will certainly be there.
I remember the first time I listened to a perfect-condition vinyl of something that I had always only streamed— I was immediately struck by how much more spatially-open it was. I imagine that was pretty deliberately done by the producer and with the necessary high-end loss in lossily compressed music, it just doesn't make it through. Not sure if I would still be able to tell as much of a difference in my 40s as I did in my early 30s, but I think most people would be subtly more engrossed in the music, even if not consciously. That was also sitting at home directly in front of my modest but competent stereo. The real question is context. Will the listening devices convey those subtleties? I know a lot of people are using streaming services as sources for home audio these days, so maybe it would to them? Certainly wouldn't to me as I was listening to music while riding the subway. I might enjoy having it available for a nice sit-down critical listening session.
Great question. There's no way to know outside of big randomized trials but I'd bet thousands of dollars it's the latter. (edit: surely this has been studied, right?)
Though, I'm certain it would be less "perceiving excellence" like a connoisseur, and more like reaping the practical benefits of solid typography.
While there's certainly a lot of showy typography in the world, the sort found in the body copy of books is generally focused on readability, in other words, letting the eye/brain more easily recognize letters and words. Do we enjoy a book more when our eyes and brains aren't overtaxed? It's hard to imagine otherwise -- who enjoys eye strain?
I'm less sure of it but I suspect this is true for lossy vs. lossless music as well. For example, one telltale sign of badly compressed music is when the percussion sounds more like blasts of white noise than the actual instruments -- these sharp transients are hard to losslessly compress efficiently. (It's somewhat similar to how the sharp edges of text and line art are not handled well by some lossy image formats like JPEG)
Is a drum that actually sounds like a drum going to be more pleasing to the ear than something garbled and white-noisy, even if nobody tells you anything? Generally yes, I am fairly sure.
I'd say: before being aware of how typography should look, the main difference is that reading a badly-set book will feel tiring for some reason that's hard to pin, but it's definitely not content. After being made aware, it's just annoying - if you can name the thing that's wrong, you recognize it's wrong.
> Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
The XKCD comic I linked makes an important point though: someone else pointing out the issues to you can make all the difference. At least with my experience, it literally took that comic for my brain to suddenly start recognizing kerning as a concept, and subsequently see issues with it everywhere.
> I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences.
That I agree with, and I think in those cases, giving someone even the most basic framework to understand what is "good" and what is "bad" is enough to make them much more aware of the issues in the works they're enjoying.
Studies have shown that well-compressed lossy audio is nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This is certainly true for me. I can sometimes pick out the compressed version if I know the track well and can look for specific details, but generally I'm absolutely not consciously aware of any compression artifacts.
Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
And yet...
I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences. I believe there may be parallels with lossy vs. lossless compression when it comes to music, and with many other experiences as well -- you may not be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with cheap butter and grass-fed butter in an A/B test, but might you enjoy one cookie more than the other anyway?