Our jurisdiction is fairly pragmatic. We do, indeed, require the memorisation of ritual; it's certainly not to be delivered from a book. That said, the UGLE prints the Emulation Ritual, with rubrics, in English (with core-concept words shortened to initials), and allows the "little blue book" to be present in the lodge. In practice this means that all ritual work is performed from memory, but a past master (usually, but not always, the immediate past master) has a copy available for accurate prompting if somebody stumbles on a line or misses one. (Key word here being "accurate": the prompter doesn't risk mis-remembering or giving a prompt from deprecated wording that was used 20 years ago when he was in the chair.) As far as I can tell, it works.
My own lodge takes considerable pride (and pains) in doing good ritual from memory as is masonic tradition; we have strong LoI sessions, the brothers share out lectures, etc., where they can so that everyone who wants a chance gets one, and they genuinely believe they have a stake in one another's successes at taking on the roles. Speaking as someone whose day job also involves a lot of ritual, I have found the whole set-up admirable, as well as the attitudes of my lodge brethren. The way the book is used is nothing I have any quibbles with, because it seeks to honour the spirit of what the ritual work is about. I think I'd be less keen on ritual openly book-read simply because, when it works as it's supposed to, ritual from memory embeds itself into the heart as well as the mind of the speaker. But if I came across a lodge that did it from the book, I don't suppose it would be an absolute deal-breaker for me; I'd just be very glad my lodge does ritual as it does.