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It may depend on country. I've about 3,000 paper books, mostly UK publishers, some Irish and USA houses. It's hard to find fiction / novels not using:
Serif
Paragraph is always and only an indent. Maybe a very small number of books for very small children here have paragraph spacing.
Extra paragraph space is more common than * * * etc for a scene break.
But it's definitely not an absolute thing. I do have maybe 50+ pre 1914 books (actual print years, not reprints) and they all use the common scheme.
Reference books, technical books, text books and manuals vary a lot more in formatting. I don't remember ever reading fiction with sans-serif. It's in a very few non-fiction.
We have every Genre and decade of printing from about 1905 to today.
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