ROBUST discussion

A super-inspirational test explaining why you should use Baskerville in your book for extra credibility -- and sales.

[url=http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...]

Well, there's things they could have done to make the experiment a bit more robust and convincing (much of which would require a lot more information on who was actually answering the questions), but it's still very interesting and worthy of thought.

Though taking the analysis at face value, wouldn't Baskerville also communicate formality, something that's grand in say an essay about English legal history, but not so grand in many types of fiction?

J.A. wrote: "wouldn't Baskerville also communicate formality?"

Possibly. This could be about authority, or it could be about association. As you say, the test wasn't designed to exclude a wide variety of possibilities. However, from the very large numbers of respondents, and from the blindness of the test from their perspective (they weren't asked about type but made an indirect judgement about a natural disaster influenced by the type), I would be inclined to accept the findings as a significant pointer.

It incidentally confirms my standard choice for ebooks, made for both psychological and technical reasons, of Times New Roman. I may consider switching to Baskerville, which was the choice of my first publishers, though there will be expense involved as the books will become fatter, but I'm just wondering if Times New Roman doesn't have all those advantages, plus economy with paper when the same setting is used for the trade edition.