A system and method for digital communications with unbalanced codebooks is provided. A transmitter includes a channel encoder that generates an output codeword from an information vector provided by an information input, and a modulator/transmitter circuit coupled to the channel encoder. The modulator/transmitter circuit prepares the output codeword for transmission over a physical channel. The channel encoder encodes the information vector into an intermediate codeword using a first code and shapes the intermediate codeword into the output codeword having a desired distribution.