Mising book?
May be I'm wrong (no time to read the all five books!) but, I'm missing a book from the core service lifecycle: what about "Service Building"? (We have strategy, design and transition... we need to build it, so it was a very important opportunity to enter in the world of IT Project management and SW and IT Systems development and CMMI)
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
BOKKED may not be the forum
BOKKED may not be the forum to discuss this, but you make an interesting point.
Building is in the scope of ST
Check out ST §1.3.2 p. 7 "This publication provides guidance for the development and improvement of capabilities for transitioning new and changed services into the production environment, including release planning building, testing, evaluation and deployment."
On the other hand, there is a comma missing after "release planning".
Release Build implies translate action plan into work orders
My take on the release planning, build, test etc activities is that these relate to the release itself and are post a similar 'build' at the end of design, where the elements of a service are assembled and tested as part of a post development quality assurance stage. Release must already be active 'building' as it is required to stage elements from the development environment to a controlled test or QA environment. In most Release 'best practice' guides (non-ITIL), the 'build' activities equate to the development of the work orders (tasks) specific to migrating the service, system, or change into production status.
The allocation of resources and scheduling of all build related activities (work orders) are authorized by change management.... The target change or new service is contained in a previous specification document (ITIL?) - sometimes called an 'action plan' or 'service configuration'
In the Service Management Body of Knowledge (SMBOK) a sequence of 'service configuration' (post-development pre-assurance), 'service offering' (post-assure, pre-deploy), and 'service instance' (deployed, in production, in commission/warranty stage) is provided representing the latter stages of a service - all controlled by Release and subject to Build activities!
ITIL V3 is EXTREMELY vague on how this all actually comes together, when Release is actually involved (can be as early as Strategy), within what governance framework, and working to what 'best practices'...
Release is the "forgotten process" of ITIL
Agreed. Release is the "forgotten process" of ITIL, less so in V3 but still a long way from clearly defined and crisply interfaced with the other areas.