Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

The literacy rate does affect the prices of books, but the high price of writing materials will keep them high even if you could set up a work-house of literate poor or slaves to do the scribe work. As there were various shorthand writing styles in the antiquity, the cost of scribing could be pushed very low at the price of legibility.

The "Book Rules for GURPS" is still online. I'll check it and apply them to the current edition.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Great for magical tomes, but not really applicable to reality.
Degree of fanciness rarely coincides with usefulness.
Haven't we all read pretty calligraphy fonts that slow reading? And obviously anything but very tiny illumination is all about pretty, taking up space that could be used for more words.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That, I strongly suspect, is a question of familiarity rather than fanciness vs. utility. If, say, blackletter and ligatures were inherently difficult to read, I can't imagine that they'd have been used for centuries. Now, modern calligraphic styles may substitute aesthetic effect for utility, but at this point, manuscript traditions are pretty much dead, and those styles are deliberately designed to look good, not to be read. Different bag of cats.

That said, I largely agree that fanciness and utility are orthogonal. A Bible, for example, might gain a bit of utility by larger capitals at the start of each chapter, verse numbers set off to the side, and the words of Christ in a different color of ink, but does it really become easier to read and comprehend if there are jousting muskrats in the capitals and a shiny splash page for every book? I don't think so. Now, they certainly have utility in a social context. Fancier stuff impresses people (and GURPS has rules for that, of course). That's why books like that were produced. But as an improved information resource? I'm not seeing it.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That's 98% perfectly legible, meaning you can just glance at it to read it. The 74% version isn't "26% of this book is unreadable," it's "26% of this book looks cramped and hastily written - you'll need to read a little more closely to make the words out." Offhand, I'd say that reading time should be increased by 20% per MoF - so 74% of the book can be read at full speed, 9.7% takes 1.2x as long, 7% takes 1.4x as long, 4.6% takes 1.6x as long, 2.8% takes 1.8x as long, 1.4% takes 2x as long, and 0.5% takes 2.2x as long. That works out to an average increase of around 12%, which is probably acceptable.

EDIT: I should note here that I'm just using the actual MoF for critical failures. If instead you'd like to go with "Critical Failures are automatically MoF 10 or worse," this is a 13% or so increase instead; this boost can probably be safely ignored.

Note tools (like books) actually follow the scheme of Basic for +0, Good for +1, Fine for +2 (rather than Good for +0, Fine for +1, Very Fine for +2), but that's just nomenclature. A 50% perfectly legible book would, using my above suggestion, take around 1.3x as long to read as normal, which may be acceptable. A 37.5% legible one would take nearly twice as long (1.9x) to read as normal. That's probably not a horrible scheme, honestly.

Wait, so instead of Cost of Living (B265), you're just assuming characters spend their entire* wage on supporting themselves?

*Assuming they simply have average wage for their Status, that is.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Supply was also a thing in medieval Europe - IIRC it was the 1300s before paper making made it into Northern Europe and another century before it became common.

Again, IIRC this was more or less the Roman method of "mass publishing" that allowed them to have a "leisure" books trade: one reader dictated the work to a room full of slave (or very low paid) scribes, thus producing as many copies as there were writers. Using low production standards and (relatively) cheap Egyptian papyrus paper this allowed (relatively) cheap publication of books (generally in scroll format) on (relatively) trivial topics.

Meanwhile ... all this sort of gives the laugh to the huge libraries found in most fantasy works. Any kind of realistic pricing should see those books being worth an absolute fortune rather than just being set-dressing.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Yes: I'm using it as the total monthly budget. For TL0 it mean's that most of your labor goes to support you at a basic level and all the luxuries allowed by higher technology will keep you spending most of your salary each month on "essentials". Also jobs with higher wages than the TL norm for that status mean that you'll have more to spend after keeping up with the Joneses. What you get in those "essentials" is a lot higher on TL8 than on TL0. Why there's no TL adjustment on the CoL table in the Characters, I don't know.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

As far as I known, one aspect of the Carolingan Reform was the introduction and dissemination of a simpler caligraphy, one that was quicker and more efficient both to write and to read. And in general, I don't think medieval books are caligraphed in a way that makes them hard to read, although personally, I find even modern handwriting hard to read. Not just my own which is clearly barely legible, but even that of others. I seem to partly have lost the ability to read handwriting easily, and partly I lack the patience.

But most medieval texts? I'd imagine they were pretty easy, if I knew Latin.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

"The Long Ships", famous Viking novel, mentions one senior Catholic clergyman, below the rank of Bishop but still quite senior, as having a huge library of "more than 70 volumes". My impression from "Name of the Rose", taking place several centuries later, is that its library had many hundreds of books.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

That's certainly reasonable. There are quite a few surviving medieval catalogs, and the most impressive ones run to a few thousand items. The famous 11th century inventory of Cluny (a very important monastic house) only has 570 items on it, but may be incomplete. The 14th century inventory for Christ Church, Canterbury is about 1850, Leicester 900, Dover 450.

Since the total number of surviving works from the Classical world is seldom estimated at more than 10,000 volumes, a medieval library with two thousand volumes may actually hold 5 or 10% of everything that exists, as impressive a collection as a major national library today.

Re: Making books in Low-Tech & LT:Companions 1 & 3
 

Well, that depends. Many settings seem to have paper and industrial magic, and some printing and various kinds of mechanization or its magical equivalent, so it is not surprising if the availability of books is more like 19th century England than 10th century Hungary. Sadly many fantasy authors do not study history so do not do this consciously!