dtgreene: Therefore, only use a spellbook if you have already learned another spell in the realm (and therefore have some SP in that realm already).
kmonster: I disagree. Using the spellbook before another spell in the realm is picked frees inventory space and the knowledge of another spell might even increase the spellpoints you get then.
Yes, but if you do that, you need to be careful; if there is no other spell you can learn in that realm, you won't be able to get spellpoints in that realm. Freeing up inventory space is literally the only reason to do this.
In Wizardry 6, for example, if you use a Book of Silence on a Psionic or Monk, and you don't change the character's class, the character will *never* be able to cast that spell (that's the only Air realm spell in the Psionic spellbook). There are other cases where there might be other spells learnable from that realm, but not until higher levels, so you might be stuck with an unusable spell for quite a while.