I worry I have ignored them if they look like plain old books. I hope they look different, am I right?

The one to boost Charisma doesn't work either. But str., int., dex. and con. all do. Great fun having 25 int lol

Magic tomes? Which ones? If you're talking about the stat-boosting ones, they don't exist in BG2, but to answer your question, yes, they did look different.

If you really want to see magic tomes, you can always use the create item cheats, all the tomes you can find in original BF1 are still in the program, the only one that won't work (ie. boost your attribute) is the Tome of Wisdom (book08, I think), but the rest still works.