Cost of Ink

Ink (1 oz.) 8gp
Seriously? How many pages of writing would that be?
The reason I found this is because for a sunken city type campaign location I’m making a bunch of technomagical items an naturally Helmet of the Squid will have the ability to squirt ink (non magically).

they must be using the same brand of inkjet desk top printer as me!

A modern inkjet printer can yield 6,000 pages per 8 ounces of ink. If we assume the efficiency of handwritten pages is 1/10th that, then 8 ounces of ink would yield 600 pages. For simplicity, let’s call it 800 pages per 8 ounces of ink, or 100 pages per oz.
Accordingly, each page costs 1 copper piece in ink. Quite a deal!

That makes ink 28% more valuable than electrum by weight :wink:
I’ll just say this ink is made from ground up gems, glue bioled from centaurs and soot from burned heretics which help magic scrolls be that special something.

True. But lots of things are more valuable than electrum by weight. You can see that for yourself just from looking at the merchandise tables. Coins were used as money, not because of their unique value, but because they were easy to shape, hard to damage, easy to weigh, and hard to counterfeit.
I have not been able to find any historical evidence for the cost of ink, but from what I’ve read it was a laborious process and doesn’t seem cheap. Does anyone have a source?
A book in ACKS will cost about 1sp-2sp per page of parchment and 1cp per page of ink. The parchment is about 10-20 times as expensive as the ink, but the two collectively are quite expensive.

I used about 3 oz of india ink to create all of my illustrations in the book. The material ingredients are extremely common and cheap, and have been in use for millenia in Asia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_ink. Other kinds of ink have been developed through history using organic and inorganic material - some rarer than others depending on their color. I imagine if your ink was obtained from a rare source like directly from a cephalopod, it would command a high price - though these were more often used in dyes available only to those who could afford them, as in the production of purple parchment in the Roman and Byzantine eras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_parchment. Having an expensive form of ink in-game perhaps serves as a means to elevate the production cost of magical study and research? There were silvered and gold inks in use in many of these old world manuscripts which would have been very precious and would definitely command a high price at market.