← All conjectures · Book economics & scribal labour
The long book's discount
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Piecework suggests copying should price linearly — twice the folios, twice the fee. The conjecture is that it did not: copying showed economies of scale, with the per-folio fee falling as codices lengthened, because the fixed costs of a commission — procuring and holding the exemplar, agreeing the format, cutting the ruling pattern, negotiating with the client — were amortized over more pages. A scribe would rather copy one long book than four short ones for the same total folios, and priced accordingly. If this holds, the pre-print corpus's tilt toward long texts is partly a supply-side discount rather than pure demand, and recorded fees should betray a scale curve that flat piecework theory forbids.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (carries the verdict): in fee-bearing colophons within the same genre and region, the per-folio fee for codices in the top length quartile is at least 25% below that of the bottom quartile, and a regression of log total fee on log length yields an elasticity significantly below 1, with point estimate at most 0.85. Secondary clause: the discount is steeper where exemplars were scarce.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
SfarData — colophons recording both scribal fees and codex extent; the kill is a statistical regression on the fee-length relationship.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind from the model's own knowledge in a zero-tool session and emitted directly as final text.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Fixed commission overheads (exemplar procurement, format setup) are recognized cost components, but the economies-of-scale prediction—per-folio fee >=25% lower in the top length quartile, log-log fee elasticity <=0.85—has not been estimated from fee-and-extent colophons.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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