As a fan, these books are great. But that's just it - they are called "media guides" to be used by the media to better understand the school and team they were covering. But these guides went from being pamphlets for the media, to be used as recruiting propaganda. I have a few of those hard bound media guides. Get this - one of the reasons the NCAA limited the inside pages to black & white was because Iowa State of all places printed a 4-color, hard bound book. It didn't seem to help the Cyclones very much though. The most recent one I've seen was a couple of year's ago Georgia State printed a hard bound book when their head coach whose name escapes me, maybe Lefty Driessel, was going to set some milestone win. Notre Dame was one of the first to start this craze. The Irish's books would always be huge and have some ridiculousness to it. Like printing player's home addresses and phone numbers. It was really gaudy. And let me say this, some may think it doesn't matter to recruits and those folks may be right. But if Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado or recruiting some kid in football and the recruiter from the Huskers plops down their 400+ page media guide and JayHawks coach puts down their 100-page book, what's that recruit going to think? That kid will think, wow Nebraska is willing to spend whatever it takes to be great in football, while it seems Kansas just does the bare minimum, no wonder they can't compete. It's all about perception a.k.a. - propaganda! That's why if the NCAA really wanted to level the recruiting propaganda wars they'd institute a Recruiting Guide, whereby everyone was bound by the same rules and regulations - # of pages, color usage, money spent...etc. But remember who makes up the NCAA - it's member schools, and who serves on committees but presidents, AD's and other athletic administrators.
