A lot to respond to here. To begin, the colors in the Bead Color Book are all those recorded by Karklins, Burgess, and Sherer in bead collections from archaeological sites and some beadwork. They do not include modern (post ca. 1900) colors as there are so many hues after that date that even the full Munsell Book of Color does not have chips for many of them (as personally observed).

Yes, the book is bulky and I believe they used their standard loose-leaf binder rather than create a thinner one. And it is expensive for a cover and a few pages of chips. I mentioned this to the Munsell rep I worked with pointing out not many researchers could afford $159 or whatever price one can now find on the Internet. He said the price was based on production cost for a small run project like this.

And having used it, I must say that larger chips would have been better but that was the publisher's choice not ours.

Putting the system online likely wouldn't work because of the problems with color resolution on different computer screens. It just wouldn't be accurate enough.