You have to tell Arena where to find the book,and which one to use.
To do that, you have to click on "Book" -> "Manage". This gets you to this screen:
There you can tell Arena how to use the book.
Using opening books in Arena?
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May 29, 2016
0
#3
Yeah, what fuzzbug said. 
Arena actually has three levels of opening books. The first level is the Arena mainbook, which is what fuzzbug was talking about. You just pick a mainbook with an .abk file extension, and all of the engines will use it, as long as you tell each engine to use the mainbooks, as shown below:
The second level of opening books is the Arena engine book. These are also .abk books, but it allows you to specify different engine books for each engine.
The third level of opening books is the individual engine internal book. For example, a polyglot book would fit this category. With this internal book, the Arena GUI doesn't get involved. The engine has to be designed to use internal books, and you have to specify the internal book via the individual engine configuration boxes.
As you can see, opening books can get complicated in Arena, but it gives you a large degree of flexibility.
Thanks guys, but I actually ended up ditching Arena. I kept running into problems with it and the interface looks like it was designed for windows 98 lol. I ended up sticking with Mayura (my personal favorite). However, I will miss the analysis that Arena offers, and also the machine vs. machine games (like Rybka vs. stockfish). I hope my forum post helped others out with Arena though!
May 30, 2016
0
#5
Try Lucas Chess, it has the best analysis view I have seen. And you can set up tournaments between engines etc.
It uses UCI engines only, many are already included.
Another-Life wrote:
Try Lucas Chess, it has the best analysis view I have seen. And you can set up tournaments between engines etc.
It uses UCI engines only, many are already included.
Yeah, I've heard of Lucas chess. One question though. Is there a free chess gui that has a 3D AND 2D board along with analysis and custom uci engines?
May 31, 2016
0
#7
jpaluska wrote:
Another-Life wrote:
Try Lucas Chess, it has the best analysis view I have seen. And you can set up tournaments between engines etc.
It uses UCI engines only, many are already included.
Yeah, I've heard of Lucas chess. One question though. Is there a free chess gui that has a 3D AND 2D board along with analysis and custom uci engines?
Do you really need 3d? 
Try this:
http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/
lol I don't "need" 3D, but it would be nice to have a sort of "all in one" program that does everything haha.
(Options/Appearance)
Sooo... I loaded stockfish into Arena along with Arasan and a couple weaker engines but I've run into a problem with them playing openings. It seems like they don't know where to find the files for the opening book. I know this because I will play e2-e4 and Stockfish will think for a good 15 seconds before playing a move. I would continue with an opening and then Stockfish would think for about another 15-30 seconds before making a second move. Why aren't openings working in Arena. Arena is so complicated to use. Thanks for the help!