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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1760693" data-attributes="member: 9254">Paper has always been the expensive part in the written process.  You have a mixture of various plant fibers and a binder agent.  The understanding of the chemical process is limited, the mechanical tolerances of the tools varies significantly, and the process control is empirical.  Simply rendering the plant fibers into a workable format can be a copious amount of work depending on the local resources.  The net result is that you have a select number of people able to consistently turn out quality paper who can charge a premium.  IIRC, europe mainly switched to a linen-type paper because there were more fabric mills and weavers than there were paper mills so linen was cheaper for the quality.  IIRC in the PHB "paper" is the higher-quality archivist material while "parchment" will be the cruder, cheaper, locally made materials.  So most people will use parchment over paper simply due to expediency.  Also historical paper is far superior to most of what we use today, at least for long-term archiving.  Our papers tend to disintigrate, yellow, and age while papers made more than a century ago have several times the functional life.  Part of it is the mass-production concept; we can always print more.  At least, that's the belief.  The reality is often different.</blockquote>