I was wondering if four color process books like Tintbook, Process Color Manual and Color Index 2 are obsolete as general references for defining process color on the computer? Is so, why and what alternatives are there?

I posted a similar question on a different forum. I am combining comments from two people below:

COMMENT ONE

The books with process swatches they all have the same drawback: They somehow predate digital color management.

I have no idea why do you want one of this books but, this said, you might be better off with one of these two items:

1. A Pantone (or Pantone-like) colour guide for the kind of printing you usually work with.

2. A book on colour combinations to get ideas of shades that work well and fit together

COMMENT TWO

Swatch books might be good for inspiration as you muse about color, but they're not much more useful than a box of crayons. Buying a swatch book in the hope that it will give you magic formulae for creating CMYK colors is an exercise in head-banging.

The problem is that CMYK is a device-dependent color space. IOW, the device that prints the CMYK build (offset press) determines the final color.

The 21st century version of swatch books is something like Pantone's GOE system. Each color gives you values expressed in L*a*b, a device-independent color space. Assuming you know your final CMYK output destination (and have an accurate profile of that), you can get a very close match to your expectations.

Any thoughts on what these people said?