i really, strongly, believe that the spells should be divided up into spellbooks by purpose not by element. the spellbook system is really silly at the moment, and this is the easiest way to fix it without redesigning all the spells. that's not to say you should remove the elemental shards that increase elemental spells: that is really important. let me explain.
currently you choose between the elemental books at character creation. this creates the ridiculous situation where you either need all of them (because you're interested in magic and you have no idea what shards you might end up with, as does the ai) or you save a load of points and take one of them (because if you're not focused on shards and magic, they effectively all do the same thing anyway, and a lot of the good spells are either elementless, or come in later books). if you are new to the game you end up picking the books you want to specialize in and if you do this you are stupid, because picking them does not help you specialize at all. why allow new players to make a decision they will almost invariably get wrong?
the later spell books are split up by purpose, but still contain elemental spells. it would be much better if this was done consistently all through the game.
this way you choose from the book of lesser destruction, the book of lesser conjuring, the book of lesser defense etc. so instead of choosing an arbitrary "flavour," you choose something that actually reflects your chosen game style (or that of the AI sov in question). this way it doesn't matter what elemental shard you get because all the books contain spells from different elements. if you have the book of destruction and find a fire shard, then you use fireball. if you find a water shard you use snowball, or whatever. the whole thing then becomes much less of a turkey shoot. and if you want to choose all the books, you get even more power per shard you find, just as it was always intended.
even better, this way you can link the various books together very neatly on the technology tree. if you start with the book of lesser summoning, you can then research the book of greater summoning. if not, you have to start from scratch.
really, i get the idea that people want to specialize their characters in ice magic, i really do. but so long as spell performance is tied to shards (as it should be) then giving them the illusion of this choice is a really bad idea.
the ai sovs don't choose different books for ai reasons. so if you choose anything but all the books you're playing a different game to them, and that's not the idea. if you split spells by purpose instead of element then both players and the ai can make interesting choices that do not gimp them in any way.
