Do these actually.....do anything, the Recipes you can buy from shopowners?
IE do they add themselves to the "Recipe List" when you go into alchemy, or are they just sorta for reference.

As far as I can tell, they are a reference. I have not checked to see if reading them gives you the recipe in your Alchemy window or not. I kind of wish there was a "recipe book" that they could plop into. Once I started throwing ingredients together, I found I was discovering recipes on my own faster than buying any recipes in game.

I am sure they are there just to get you started in Alchemy with the expectation that you would stumble into what I do, which is throwing things together to see what works..

They don't do anything. Frankly it would have been cool if it enabled that effect for the ingredients in the recipe once you read them.

I gave up buying them after I found I bought three or four of the same recipe.

The 'gobble and mix' method seems to be the go as far as alchemy is concerned. A recipe book would be nice, then I would only have to take the ingredients I want for specific things to the table, rather than everything and then mix and match.

A recipe book would be nice, good idea for a mod. I also wish that recipes dropped like scrolls do, one of the things I liked in Daggerfall was that you found recipes as loot a lot. I never used potitons but it was cool to try and find all the recipes.