Copying Mundane Texts: Pricing and Time Guidlines?

[Ravens_cry]

We recently acquired some books as treasure on a subject that interests my character greatly. Astronomy, if you must know. The session closed shortly after we acquired them, but I don't believe they are magical. However, they are quite valuable, 1000gp, and my character wants them but can't afford to buy them from the party. After the session, it occurred to me that my character could copy them out. This was typical in pre-printing presses societies when someone wanted a book for themselves. But while I have knowledge of rules for copying spell books and other magical writings, I have never heard tell of guidelines for the same for mundane texts.
Is there any?
And if not, how long would be reasonable? What kind of costs would be incurred?
I await any answer with delight and trepidation.

[Dr Bwaa]

There's a spell to do it called Amanuensis, in the Spell Compendium I think, or maybe Complete Mage/Arcane. Copies 250 wpm iirc.

[Ravens_cry]

There's a spell to do it called Amanuensis, in the Spell Compendium I think, or maybe Complete Mage/Arcane. Copies 250 wpm iirc.
Both books are out, I am afraid. Besides, I want to solve the mundane with the mundane, if possible.

[Dr Bwaa]

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Handwriting), you're looking at around 22 wpm (with a word standardized to any 5-character block, including spaces, etc); you can probably convince a DM to give you more if you have a high INT, I imagine. Depending on how much your DM knows/cares about ink, it could get quite expensive. I'm not sure how many words one ounce of ink can produce, since that depends entirely on the kind of lettering, but you're going to be spending a lot on ink (and potentially also on paper, which is mercifully actually statted out in the PHB (still going to run you 400gp per thousand pages). Ink, of course, is unhelpfully labeled "one ounce of black ink" :smallannoyed:).

[Swordgleam]

Were I the DM, I'd just say, "You work on that during rests at camp while everyone else is polishing their armor/whatever" and roll 2d10+3 or so for each book to see how many days it takes you. If you wanted to do it in one marathon session I'd try to find some relevant skill on your character sheet.

Just watch out for medieval lawyers going after you for breach of copyright. :smallwink:

[lsfreak]

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Handwriting), you're looking at around 22 wpm (with a word standardized to any 5-character block, including spaces, etc); you can probably convince a DM to give you more if you have a high INT, I imagine.

While a good baseline that's probably enough for most DM's, worth noting that that's likely a heavily Latin-biased statistic. Compare Latin to Devanagari and then to Hebrew, for example; I'm guessing speed of copying changes based on the strokes per glyph (to say nothing of glyphs per word). Even taking related alphabets, compare Celtic languages to Russian - the latter is almost letter-to-phoneme correspondent, while Celtic languages have many 'dummy' letters. The grammar of the language being copied into will have an impact, too.
Take the theoretic sentence "The dogs run." One language lacks articles and marks plurals with ablaut - Deg run (6 glyphs). Another inflects via suffixes, including gender and nominative case for both nouns and articles - Tels dogels run (13 glyphs). Both have the exact same meaning but the grammar of the language more than doubles the length of the written sentence. Add to the second language extra glyphs as a result of old spellings - i.e. Tehls dogehls rrun - and the same sentence changes drastically.

/end languagenerd

Also an issue of readability; if you're copying them just for yourself it'll be faster than copying them as a scribe would, and some people are naturally slower/neater writers than others.

[Kosjsjach]

My first thought was the Amanuensis spell, but you say you want to keep it mundane (which is a shame, if you're dealing with mundane texts). A quick look in the Arms and Equipment Guide prices the daily services of a scribe at 3sp/day; now you just have to negotiate with your DM how fast these texts are copied. Assuming 25 words/minute (nice number) and 250 words/page (apparently standard in D&D) and an 8-hour work day (maximum), that's up to 48 pages copied per day per scribe hired.

In the end, it's up to your DM. Hope these figures helped.

[Fizban]

Heh, you could always use the craft system. Pay 1/3 the base price then roll craft checks till you die from old age. Well I thought it was funny.