Books & how to read ?

[Limbabnees]

Hi,

im not understand the reading book thing.

How do the books look like?
Where to find what kind of books?
How the read them?

What about the Comprehension Perk?

 

[victor]

You right click on them in your inventory, just like any Aid item. You can't read any book though, just special ones ("pre-war books" can be sold to a special character, though).

 

[Mapex]

Skill books look less like books but more like magazines/comic books/other paperback books. They also have interesting names:

Unarmed book is called "Pugilism Illustrated"
Melee weapon book is called "Grognak the Barbarian"
Sneak book is called "Chinese Spec Ops: Infiltration Training" or something along those lines

I have not found any book outside of those three books, but I've focused almost entirely on the main quest and haven't done much exploring.

 

[Seelix]

There are several types of skill-books [each type for every skill], which are "eatable" and dispappear aftre use:

Big Book of Science [Science]
Chinese Army: Special Ops Training Manual [Sneak]
D.C. Journal of Internal Medicine [Medicine]
Dean's Electronics [Repair]
Duck and Cover! [Explosives]
Grognak the Barbarian [Melee]
Guns and Bullets [Small Guns]
Lying, Congressional Style [Speech]
Nikola Tesla and You [Energy Weapons]
Pugilism Illustrated [Unarmed]
Tales of a Junktown Jerky Vendor [Barter]
Tumblers Today [Lockpicking]
U.S. Army: 30 Handy Flamethrower Recipes [Big Guns]

They give +1 point to skill [+2 if PC has "Comprehension" perk].

They're to be found in many places, sometimes in places like abandoned shacks/shops which aren't marked on main map, so some exploration is really needed.

Other books are some kind of joke - just another useless junk. I can understand that destroyed or burned books are unreadable and peeople keep them for sentiment or just forgot to thrown them away, but pre-war books which seems to be intact? It would be nice to find some fragments of classical literature or just anything to read there... That's a shame there's nothing there.

 

[Speebs]

I could never figure out why pre-war books survived 300 years after the war either. Then again cars and buildings shouldn't have, either.

It also makes no sense that skill books go into the "aid" section of your pip-boy. It took me a little while to realize this and thought the game was deleting them from my inventory for a while.

 

[Seelix]

It also makes no sense that skill books go into the "aid" section of your pip-boy. It took me a little while to realize this and thought the game was deleting them from my inventory for a while.

I thought the same.
And then I found them in... my fridge. I just dumped there all food everytime I gathered more and since it was quite a lot of various boxes I clicked some skill-books by mistake too.

I do not like the way items are presented in inverntory. But books aren't as much retarded as misc items. There is one and only icon for just about everything and player has to drop item just to see what the hell it looks like since not always name indicates what the item exactly is and descriptions simply don't exist.

 

[TorontoReign]

I could never figure out why pre-war books survived 300 years after the war either. Then again cars and buildings shouldn't have, either.

It also makes no sense that skill books go into the "aid" section of your pip-boy. It took me a little while to realize this and thought the game was deleting them from my inventory for a while.

While in the real world the buildings and books would be decayed completely... it is safe to assume that a 50's sci-fi culture that has nuclear cars, robots, and power armor, can develop wood that wont be destroyed as fast.

 

[golfmade]

Other books are some kind of joke - just another useless junk. I can understand that destroyed or burned books are unreadable and peeople keep them for sentiment or just forgot to thrown them away, but pre-war books which seems to be intact? It would be nice to find some fragments of classical literature or just anything to read there... That's a shame there's nothing there.

My guess is that the pre-war books are valuable to an NPC somewhere in the game. I've found quite a lot of them and are holding onto them, just dunno where they need to end up.

 

[Seelix]

My guess is that the pre-war books are valuable to an NPC somewhere in the game. I've found quite a lot of them and are holding onto them, just dunno where they need to end up.

There is some BoS scribe at Arlington Library who pay for pre-war books. Still, those items are unfortunatley just unreadable pieces of junk but a bit more valuable than other .