Responses
You're right! THEY'VE GOT SOFTCOPIES
lmao. technology be cursed. Need another wipe out. To cut that loophole, maybe for the ritual, they need the original book for it to have its effect. A copy or scanned copy is all good to pass the knowledge but the physical primary source material "blessed" by that unique shaman -who has already passed- is what makes the difference to conjure and has been brewing its energy for +200 years. Finding other books with those same conditions will be hard to find again.
In the side stories, the Mugo brothers' ages were based on the order of their creation while he was in the urn..
And what if the books we're scanned and saved in the cloud