Book of Glyph Mastery - What's the Deal?

Although I was only in the JMTC meeting for a short time last night, there was a bit of a debate on how exactly Books of Glyph Mastery really work....do they teach you old school recipies? Do they teach only "un-teachables"? Is unteachables even a word?


When leveling my scribe, I was popping the Book of Glyph Mastery like they were going outta style. Having not completed all of the "minor" dailies, and continuing to do the "Northrends", I got to the point of not knowing any more glyphs, where I had the popup in game saying "You cannot learn anything from using this" (or something similar).

Later on, when I started to do vendor "runs", I went to Hellfire Peninsula, and noticed that a vendor sells a recipe there...Glyph of Mana Shield, and even though I had never trained it there (or bought from the AH) I had already known it.

So basically where I am going, is that I had to have learned it somewhere, and I never thought twice until recently, when a fellow blogger was asking about leveling a scribe. I told him to hold onto the Books until he had learned all the dailies, and bought up the vendors, as I basically wasted gold using a book instead of hitting up the vendors...


To make a long story short, I am now questioning myself. After talking in the meeting about it, it seemed that the answer to this question was 50/50. I am stubborn in my belief that I know what happened. Looking at wowhead comments, I once again saw conflicting answers- One in particular with an absolute TON of information in it:

By mstieler (1·31) on 04/01/2010 (Patch 3.3.3)
447 total listings for Inscription
233 from Trainers, only 221 true "recipes" [2 researches, 4 masters inscriptions, 6 levels of inscription]
205 from
Discovery [66 Minor, 83 Northrend, 57 Glyph Mastery]
1
Drop
3 Vendor

Note: This is just the math of it; I have yet to see for myself in Books of Glyph Mastery will let you learn Glyphs other than those available only to Glyph Mastery if you haven't learned all the discovery ones.
At the very least, you can learn the 221 trainer, 3 vendor, 57 Mastery, 1 Drop, and 1 of each Research glyphs.

Edit: yes, it appears to be feasible that you can learn all the glyphs from Books of Glyph Mastery. On my Inscriptionist, I had 29 Books of Glyph Mastery to use, the day I hit Northrend Inscription, so I had only used Northrend Inscription Research once, and though I've used Minor Research multiple times, I haven't learned all the Minor Glyphs. After using my books, I had learned 3 NIR Glyphs (Lifebloom, Trueshot Aura, Holy Wrath), two of which were from the books, one from research, and a few minors, most notably Pestilence.
Last edited by mstieler on 04/06/2010 (Patch 3.3.3)


So what's the conclusion? Not really sure what to think. The book itself says that they only "Discover a Glyph Recipe that is unique to this Book". Blizz has been wrong before, was my situation "hotfixed"? Did blizz make an error?

To get to my point of this post, I am wondering what you guys have seen.....