Yes, it is — in fact, on PC you can activate it (make it show in your journal) without doing the Mages Guild line. So the questline just makes it show up in the UI, while the actual entries are being recorded all along.
hmm okay, i never saw an option like that, can you tell me more how to activate it?
SeaGtGruff wrote: »Yeah, they keep track of which books you've found, because I think maybe there are achievements for finding all of the books in a certain category, or at least the zone-completion information on the left side of the zone map shows which books you've found and which ones you're still missing. It's been a while since I've completed the Mages Guild questline on a character, but I'm pretty sure the wording specifically says that the ability covers every lore book you've ever read prior to that point.