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Comment by raddad | Hacker News Reader

I found the translated text of "The Consolation of Philosophy", by Anicus Manlius Severinus Boethius

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm

"It has been translated into every European tongue, and into English nearly a dozen times, from King Alfred's paraphrase to the translations of Lord Preston, Causton, Ridpath, and Duncan, in the eighteenth century."

Books were expensive. A very rough calculation is about $450 a book. Amazon could have made as killing back then.

List of prices of medieval items

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm

How Much Is That in Today’s Money?

http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/Summer02/money2.cf...

(I did say roughly)

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> Books were expensive. A very rough calculation is about $450 a book. Amazon could have made as killing back then.

Paper was expensive. It wasn't until wood pulp techniques hit in the 1840's that the price of paper actually dropped significantly.

Did you put "Paper" in italics to suggest that paper was the primary cost in book making in the medieval era?

Because I would have thought that manual copying by scribes - the above link says it took 15 months to copy the Bible - would be more expensive.

Also, I believe the price of paper also dropped significantly in Europe when the paper mills were introduced in the 1500s. So dates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Europe .

Bibles were chained to desks because the parchment was valuable.

The fact that many times people were willing to scrape off the ink tends to imply that the manual labor involved in copying was cheaper than the substrate.

Paper mills did reduce the cost. However, paper relied on rags, and rags relied on people discarding clothing. And people only discarded cloth (which was also really expensive) only when the cloth was completely useless.

http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...

I agree that paper was expensive. I don't see evidence that paper was the paramount, much less primary cost, of book making, assuming that explains the italics. Though I haven't looked hard.

I think you've mixed up two writing materials. "Parchment" refers to animal-based materials like vellum, not paper. Yes, people scraped the ink off parchment. But according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper , deinking of paper wasn't invented until the 1700s. The same source says in the 1300s or so, the price of paper was about 1/6th the price of parchment, "and then falling further."

Your cost model says only that the labor for removing ink from parchment was less than the price of making new parchment. For made up numbers, let's say the effective price to make new parchment was $15,000 and the price to scrape the ink off was $10,000. How does that help figure out if the price to copy was $4,000 or $40,0000?

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