Will they have them or will this be yet ANOTHER staple of TES gameplay thrown on the funeral pyre?

If so, what kind of writing would you most like to see? Fiction, history, poetry, softcoe romance...?

I hope they are going to do this. Its just copy & paste of big parts of the books in skyrim and older games.

And i hope they are going to copy all sorts of books. It gives the game world much more authenticity and immersion.

But my feeling is that they are not going to do this. Probably a very trimmed down version like some short storys in a wiki-like ingame help system(that you can discover while traveling through the world).

Maybe they'll have some kind of libraries in the settlements where we can read new and known books. I think it would be good to have them for an added sense of continuity.

If I can't read the Lusty Argonian Maid I will be a little disappointed to be honest.

Yes of course there will be books, and their 'type' will the the same type that has always been in TES games, also what exactly were these staples of TES games that have been thrown out the window ?

I love reading and collecting the current in game books we have - but if TESO is set so far in the past, there will be lots of books we are familiar with (like Lusty Argonian Maid) that just haven't been written yet. New books will have to be written just for TESO.

I'd like all of the current types of books such as fiction, history, tongue-in-cheek pieces, journals, songs, epic poems and plays. Mostly I enjoy the fictional stories for pleasure, and history so I'll be better informed about, and immersed in the environment.

Since they want exploration to be a big part of your leveling, books can in a lot of ways act as "quest starters", where you pick up a rumour and go to learn the truth for yourself. That by far was the most satisfying experience I had in Skyrim. Finding the tombs of the Gauldur sons and then discovering their fate in 'Lost Legends'.

There should be a lot of books, aye. After all, it saves a few bucks on voice overs.

Yes that was actually one of my favorite things was finding a book with clues to a mystery and figuring it out, wish they had put more "quest starter" books in, also that was one of my favorite things to do in MW/OB and actually in MW every single character i ever made would find a copy of Tamrielic Lore and make it his personal quest to find every artifact in it, there is just something cool about reading about the history of something in a old book and then actually going out and finding that piece of history, THAT is true adventure.

I NEED books.

Books are probably one of the simplest things to implement in a game, just open up an new UI window and put a bunch of text in it. So mechanically there is no reason not to.

The biggest hassle would probably be actually writing all the books because, as has been mentioned above, far fewer books can be directly reused from prior games as has been the case in the main games. Old staples such as the Lusty Argonian Maid are several hundred years from being written.

I just realised that, and it's disappointing that there won't be The Real Barenziah (since she won't even be born until near the end of the Second Era) for the first time in forever. I'd say they could bring back King Edward from the same author (out-of-game author, not in-game), which is set in the First Era "before the Redguards came", but that mentions "before the Septim dynasty" in saying when it's set so that's a no go, unless they removed that line of course.

I would have said two weeks ago that "Yes of course it will have first/third-person real-time action combat like (or improved upon) Skyrim, it's a TES game!" Careful what you wish for, I'm not holding my breath any more. Anyway, as far as the myriad of other mechanics missing (aiming bows, spells, real-time melee, first-person view, art-style/aesthetics, Imperials, warring factions that don't rely on race, player housing, etc.) those things can be found talked about (by me in particular) in many other threads. Not really the topic for discussion here.

As far as the writing of the books is concerned. 250 devs, 5 years. If at least 5 of them weren't dedicated to writing more books at some point, then this developer truly does not understand what makes TES special. As Todd Howard says, the spirit of TES is in the details, not the broad strokes.

I would love to see a Book Club guild start up in-game. There could even be exploration teams set up to try to find all the books around the world. That would be tons of fun, I'd join it!

I don't see why they can't take a portion of the books from the single-player games that would exist at the time, and add some of their own.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the first act was written in the 3rd Era. You could actually speak to the author in TES 3: Morrowind as he had just finished it (it was part of a quest to get a pesky actor-wannabe to stop bothering an enchanter in Vivec). So unless a dragon break occured in the future and a copy got sent back through time 800 years before it was written, it ain't happenin'.