Oldest trick in the book for TES games: don't read anything until you are high level in all skills. The value of +1 skill point at skill level 40 is a lot higher than at skill level 1. Resist the urge to click on bookshelves until you reach VR zones.

I have never bothered trying to save them for higher levels. Other than say Enchanting, which you don't need to level past 40 anyway, most skills increase as they need to just by playing the game. Heck even Enchanting does if your obsessive about deconning glyphs you get and do some farming of the mobs that drop them. So, I hit every book shelf I see when I first get to a zone, then ignore them once I feel I have all the books for that zone.

There are only a certain number of skill books in each zone, which means you would have to go back to zone 1 to read those, then zone 2 etc if you were to wait. Of course if your doing this in the VR Ranks, so that can work with the strategy of waiting.

The problems with waiting in my mind is, mid level skill increase are much more important to unlocking useful skills than the last 5, which usually only unlock the last passive for that skill line. I would rather get the skills up into the 30's as quickly as possible so they are useful to me.

Haxnschwammer wrote: »

Skill books are not bound to a zone.

Unless something changed post 1.6/2.0, there are a certain number of skill books in each zone. This is evidenced by how many books you find the first few hours in a zone vs the last few hours in a zone. Every time I enter a new zone, I go to the Mages Guild and other book shelf populated places. I scour the bookshelves as I go along. I get a bunch of skill books right away. After a while I get one every once in a while to none at all in that zone. Once I get to the next zone, go the Mages, start getting skill books again.

If the skill books were spread across the game equally and randomly, I would expect that finding the skill books would be harder across zones 4 and 5 as I would have found most of them by then.