To be clear, I’m not discussing vertical signage involving the Latin Alphabet such as this since I’m mainly discussing formatting entire book passages, sentences or even paragraphs of information in that manner in which Chinese, Japanese or Korean allow for that kind of writing orientation found in novels (chapter books) like this:
I’ve shared a excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ve finished reading in Japanese, but the same writing format works for both Chinese and Korean. Is it because their characters look more “squarish” as they’re logographic meaning the orientation isn’t rigid allowing flexibility on being read either top to bottom vertically or left to right horizontally?
It’s down to your expectations and practice. We learn to read most Latin based languages left to right. Japanese et al. are learned in a top to bottom order; so, that’s what you’ve gotten used to. Were you to get enough practice, you could learn to read Latin based languages the same way. It would just take time and effort.