[lonnarin]

I think that while books should be utlilized in learning and conveying magical spells to one another, they should not rule whether or not one can cast or not on a daily basis. Spells/day and spell memorization in D&D's system is incredibly frustrating, and realistically, why couldn't a wizard who memorized 3 fireballs and 4 lightnings in his head not just go "oh well, treants, scrap the 4 lightnings and cast 7 fireballs"? I mean, he knows and studied both formulas, so why the static cap on how many he could cast of either one?

I'd say once you learn a spell, you know the spell for good. It's not like an aerospace engineer's going to forget how to do his daily job if he misplaces his college textbooks. Mages start off smart as can be and old for a reason, and with intelligence scores such as theirs with the number of times they solved the same equation, they had better be able to retain that knowledge. Now if they were teaching somebody else, then certainly you need to write them a diagram, show them some pages in a book and he needs to study. The book should be for study and learning, not a RAMchip.

Also, I'd like to see skillbooks being made use of similar to Oblivion's easter egg system. The amount of technical engineering of lockpicking or intense study of lore is every bit as academic as spellcraft. Of course, books shouldn't be teaching hand-ey coordination skills unless they were specifically magic. You can read an encyclopedia on juggling or bikeridings or martial arts, but you can't get better at any of that stuff without dedicated practice.