I find it very annoying to have to bring around enormous tomes with thousands of pages for a couple recipes that I’m interested in. I understand the fact that it’s not possible to read the recipe to learn it (learn by doing!) but it’d be nice to tear off the few pages I’m interested in and throw the book away. That’s what I’d be doing if I were in this situation.
I think it would be cool to use the book, tear off the recipes pages (which could still appear as books in the inventory), and maybe, why not? Build a binder to stack the recipes into (in order to declutter the inventory). You still have what you need, with 1/100th of the volume and weight.
Thoughts?
A “copy recipe to notebook” function could be neat. Or “to E-Ink”. Any way to produce a custom recipe collection would be neat.
By editing the game files, one could already create a custom book that contains all the favorite recipes. For seasoned and disciplined players, or to the contrary - the ones seeking more relaxed gameplay - it wouldn’t be much of a cheat, but rather a convenience.
In theory, one could also craft new books (collections), using existing books as ingredients. Specific recipes for those actions would have to be added. That would at least minimize inventory spam, if not volume or weight. Whether the originals should be destroyed in the process, is debatable. Because even simulated book destruction is abhorrent behavior to some of us…
Recipe redundancy (the same recipe existing in several books) could also be used as a rule for volume/weight reduction when activating some sort of imagined freeform “combine two or more books” function.
Finally, the game could have some sort of “rip pages” function, thus extracting the recipes, and removing the skill increasing potential, thus making the book significantly lighter and smaller. Whether the result is a ripped book or a bunch of ripped pages, is debatable. Or maybe both: The “ripped book” portion would maintain the skill increasing potential, while the “ripped pages” would contain the recipes.