Is there an indicator for already read books?

Question

My inventory is full of books and I want to sell them asap.

Alas, books and notes that are found in chests and bodies do not open automatically to be read. So often, when I loot, I often ask myself "What was the name of the note/book again?", scroll meters of inventory space, only to decide not to bother.

Now I have multitudes of read and unread books and notes. Is there a way to tell them apart or am I doomed to open them all one by one again?

(And yes, I do only care about the talent points. I don't actually want to read all those books. I am not that insane.)

Z-X · Accepted Answer

No such thing exists in the standard version of Skyrim, but I found this mod that marks books as read!
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/20910

juan · Answer

There is no way to do it in the vanilla game.

There are requests for mods to do this though (example)

A mod was released to do it: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/20910

Mechkov · Answer

There is no way to tell if you have opened certain books or not. What i do is usually put all the books that i have opened in a chest. Then, when i find more books or when i have collected some other books, i would opened them from my inventory, just to make sure they dont give you any skill points. Then i would place them in the same "book" chest, if a certain tome is not there yet.

Answered by Mechkov on December 29, 2020

agf · Answer

IF you only care about the skill books, then you can safely sell all the books under a base value of 30 (it may even be 50, but 30 is definitely safe).

Then you only have to open each one of that value or higher. There are only 90 different ones in the whole game (five per skill) so that shouldn't take too long as I assume you only have a small fraction of those.

yrstruly · Answer

For the books you've got stashed away somewhere already, you are sort of doomed, other than referencing a list or using the guidelines w/r/t book value.  However, you should be able to rip through them all fairly quickly by repeating the key sequence 'E/Tab/S' (on the PC, anyway) in the appropriate inventory section, since you only need to open the book to get credit for reading it.

In the future, you can read books directly from the looting interface by holding the Shift key (again: on the PC, of course) and interacting with the book while it's still in the container being looted.  Incidentally, the Shift key will also allow you to equip items directly from the looted container/body area of the looting interface, so that you need not take the item first and then move to your own inventory to equip it.

And you don't have to be insane; some of the books are actually fairly interesting, and help to flesh out the world a bit.  It is true that the reading experience itself leaves much to be desired, which is why someone make all the books into a single Kindle .mobi file for download.

Is there an indicator for already read books?

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