I personally prefer playing the game without these mods, or at least try to. Without them, it seems pretty difficult to identify the cluster stones, especially in early game without the Prospector's Pick. The ingame book doesn't come with pictures of the clusters to identify them by color and breaking the stones drops a generic version of it. Both Hematite and Limonite ore turn into Iron Clusters.

Fair - are you suggesting that I try my hand at making a custom book UI that isn't just re-skinned vanilla?

I can't think of any other way really, that wouldn't inevitably be redundant with TOP / WAILA / HWYLA.

Pictures could benefit the book in general as well, both in polish and usability. I did also get slightly bothered by the page numbers in the table of contents not lining up. ^^

Haven't other mods adopted Botania-style books before? I bet there's an open implementation out there you could clone.

I was actually looking at using something similar to what mangoose uses in Rustic / Adventurer's Workshop. They're great books that have awesome formatting.

I've been working on a new Guide GUI all day yesterday that solves this :)