A good typesetting program like TeX minimizes the occurrence of broken words. The sample page the article linked to (http://readableweb.com/ala/booklook/lanhamvolatilehard.htm) looks pretty awful to me, way too many hyphens. You don't see that many broken words in professionally typeset text.

TeX is a very good typesetting program.

One of the most irritating things about the Kindle, apart from the overpriced books and lack of second-hand sales (which would apply some pricing pressure), is its lack of hyphenation.

The text looks absolutely hideous at large font sizes. I almost think it would be better non-justified.

I don't get jolted out of the flow of text with good hyphenation. It's more distracting to me to see irregular spacing in the line. The extra spaces when the justification is working very hard feels slower-paced, and the dense lines feel higher-paced, giving this weird rhythm, something like: "sooo tthheee mmmaaannn walkedacrossthe roooaaad".

I'm much more a fan of using justified text with a minimal amount of hyphenation and word-splitting used only for really long words to prevent jarringly large spaces between words. Justification in general looks and reads fantastically well, but I agree that a lot of hyphenation and word-splitting makes it worse in both cases than a ragged right edge.

I never notice it when reading books. You do?

More so in newspapers and magazines than books, but those, too.

That's surprising to me. The only place I see un-justified text is online. Books, magazines, newspapers, even the research papers I read all have justified text with hyphenation.

How on earth did you get from your question and my response to that? You're not merely making a non sequitur, you're misrepresenting what I said.

My line of thought: You notice hyphenated words when reading. I had to ask myself, "Do I?" I don't recall noticing, but it's hard to determine that you don't notice something. So I then had to think about my reading material. Online, most text is not hyphenated - that is the genesis of the discussion, so I knew that immediately. Then I realized that the majority of my reading material is hyphenated - books, newspapers, magazines and research papers. (I even had to check some research papers to verify it.) So I concluded that I don't notice hyphenation, since I a) can't recall noticing it when reading, and b) I encounter it a lot because most of my reading material has it.

I was surprised that you did notice it, since most books are hyphenated. And now I get to ask: how is what I said a non sequitur, and how have I misrepresented what you said?