In the current state, there is no Immersive way to open or use the Recipe Book, and I have a suggestion.
This would be VR only, as I see no real way to make this work in 2d.

In VR, approaching an Immersive that normally has a Recipe Book will put one in your Off-Hand, but only visually, your actual item will still be there, it'll just be invisible(If it's a shield, it'll be disabled)

There will be 2 sections, the recipe icons, and the recipes themselves. The icons would be at the start, like a table of contents/shortcut
The table of contents will have the normal grid of recipes displayed on each page, and however many pages are needed.
On the side will be the normal Recipe tabs, and you just pull them to switch to that section.
To flip pages, you bring your hand to one end and swipe, like your turning the pages of a book.
Touching a recipe icon will flip to it's recipe page at the back of the book

You would be able to have your bag open at the same time
If there are more than 1 Recipe Book Immersive, punching an Immersive will swap the book to that ones Book.
You would need to be within a ~3 block radius of the Immersive for the Book to appear.

Another idea would be to have the book on the side of a workbench, and picking it up (optionally, it wouldn't be forced into your hand) would have it so it would be readable similarly to immersive books.

Hello! I want to take the moment to thank you for the suggestion, I do greatly appreciate suggestions, and if you have any more, I would be interested in hearing them!

That being said, I'm going to respectfully have to decline implementing this, either for the time being, or as a whole. My reasons for so are listed below:

• To my admittedly very limited knowledge, most players playing Minecraft in VR already tend to know the recipes for the game (as they've already played Minecraft for a while), and thus don't need the recipe book. Admittedly though, I'm sure it would help with placing items into the crafting table much more quickly.
• As much as I want to have it in place, I currently don't have the infrastructure in place code-wise for replacing items as you described. I may have it in place in the future, as I would like users to be able to hammer items together in an anvil, but at this time, it is currently not in place, and will require a lot of work to get in place.

Tl;dr: It's a lot for a relatively small subset of users.

A lot of the components that would make up the recipe book I see myself possibly implementing in the future (invisible items with the anvil hammer and a book with pages for an immersive written book if I ever decide to implement that), so if all those pieces are implemented at some point, I may just put them together to make the recipe book as well. Until then though, I'm going to respectfully pass on adding this.

Thank you again for the suggestion though, and if you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them! :)

As suggested in Discord, this should also be included on the bag for 2x2 crafting.

The work in ImmersiveMC's codebase has been basically done for this, and I see this to be really useful, not necessarily for learning recipes, but for crafting items more quickly, similarly to the JEI-family of mods.

I would like to add to this: it might be cool to have (optional) EMI integration. EMI has an API that allows rendering (parts of) the recipe viewer screen, which could be put on a book in a similar way to NotEnoughAnimations' in-world books.

Maybe the list of items could be on the left side of the book and the recipe(s) could be on the right side of the book.
This would function similarly to the recipe book idea above but with EMI's features, including more complex recipe and tag support.