Most likely this is a phenomenon which comes and goes in waves. It is not a question about unemployment numbers but of the timing. Do the random events of history coincide with the time of need for the covenant? That choice can safely be made to suit the story.
The big question to this is whether it is known to be a job for life, as well as how people would have viewed that opportunity. The fact is that given the Medieval work structure most jobs were for life, temporary employment of someone like a scribe was virtually unheard of, unless you were employing a student or hiring what amounted to a company (for example if you hire a blacksmith to fix something you would go to a blacksmith shop, not an apprentice or journeyman).
For the young scribe being recruited the question then is what do you know of this group of outsiders offering fantastic incentives who might be rumored to be involved with unchristian activities.
Obviously how difficult will vary depending on the circumstances, but selecting the right people to approach is always going to be an element of this sort of recruiting effort, which is why I say it would not be easy- at minimum it should be a story (in my mind at least) and not an assumed success. Possibly a low point story better left to companions than magi (especially if none are gently Gifted).
Also given how few universities there are you may find yourself in competition with another covenant for recruits.
Scribes in the later 1200s were the lowest rung of academics in university towns: everybody with a basic education and no better current prospects could offer to work as a scribe there: it was early piecework and many did not consider it a long term employment. Consequentially pay was often bad and the work had an odor of drudgery.
Here is a basic description of the Pecia system in use at early universities.
Well, the offer would be long term employment as a copyist. For scribes in university towns that work on a pay per piece basis, those kind of offers don't show up very often. Yes, if a scribe can find a job it's probably a job for life (or at least as long as the lord doing the hiring is alive), but finding the job is the hard part.
I would expect, that few of these are content with copyist jobs for life.
We are told that senior magi can get a favourite Art to 40, and it's clear that most of the advance from 20ish to 40 must be by reading Tractatus. I think this may put some pressure into the system. It's plausible that at any given time there are one or two dozen senior magi with 30+ in their chosen Art trying to push that number up as high as possible.
I imagine some of them would be living a life travelling from Covenant to Covenant, looking for new Tractatus to read in exchange for favours or Vis. Possibly even finding high-Com junior magi and offering them payment to write a Tractatus that they can read.
As senior magi, these people could have a lot of influence and might well shape Hermetic society, especially with the carrot of "when I've finished, you can have a copy of the lovely Summa I'm going to write". They might also make an interesting small scenario for the PCs' covenant, especially if two rival near-masters of the same Art turn up at the same time and ask the PCs to pick sides.
They are more likely to find work at a university library or business- bookseller, or copying business records for a shipping company. Plus they have to take another season of classes in a "useless" (to them) ability in order to do the work.
And lets not forget the impact of the Gift.
Also the majority of copyists in a university city are not looking for lifetime employment, they are looking for income to help pay their way to a bachelors or doctorate. Which is very hard to do if you have to move to the middle of nowhere to do your job.
This is not at all clear. It could be from studying vis. Yes, that's higher risk. Yes, that's expensive. But if you want to be the master of the art, it is worth it. It is plausible.
I agree. Reading hospitality is more plausible than book trade.
One of the problems I have with the extensive PC libraries is it is a lot of resources spent on books that are never read. The summæ may be popular, but a tractatus may be read by only a single magus, and then gather dust for a hundred years. Remembering then that books decay and need maintenance, it is a lot of resources which could have been spent on more servants, entertainment, oriental spices, better wine, silk, and honey.
This, of course, is a result of abstraction. The cost and the chore is abstracted away, while the benefits are easily compiled in a spread sheet which does not decay.
Studying from Vis is high risk, but has the potential for high reward. Remember, it's a stress die to study from Vis, so it could well explode, granting one a much higher yield in one season than several Tractatii.
The chance of botching does increase as the archmages need to snort progressively larger amounts of Vis.
I'd assume that adventuring might also help bringing the Arts up.
Botching leads to twilight and potentially increased insight. Every cloud has a silver lining.
We should note that canon says that the top experts get to 40. Not that every ancient magus gets to 40 in one art, and not that every magus who sets out to be an expert gets to 40. Maybe one magus gets to 40 per art in a century. Half do not try, and the rest succumb to twilight before they get there.
By itself, such an offer might not work well in a university town.
But if you add one more incentive, the copyists might really listen: tell them credibly, that in your place they might marry and raise their children. That should work far better than talk about longevity rituals or such.
Sure, there's a potential to explode, but the average roll on a stress die that doesn't botch is still just 5.75. So the expected value of XP on studying from vis is (5.75 + Aura) * (1 - botch chance), given a botch reduces the total to 0.
Which means reading a tractatus of Q(6+Aura) is not just safer, but on average advances an Art faster, than studying from vis.
The by-rule maximum allocation to any one Art in a season from adventuring is 5, even if the adventure's total source quality is 6-10. The source quality for a tractatus written by a magus with a Communication of 0 is 6.
Reading a Tractatus or Summa doesn't add the Aura to the SQ.
So with an Aura of 3, on average you'll get 8-9 xp per season from vis, vs. 6 from tractatus.
What @SEE is suggesting (I believe) is that if you can acquire a tractatus with a quality equal to (Available Aura+6, so 9, for an Aura of 3), you will benefit more from reading said tractatus that from studying from vis. And he is correct.
Vis studies have essentially not been viable past an Art of 5 since Covenants came out, because the suggested price for tractatuus is so low. Especially with the assumption that mainly decently competent authors write books.
Simply put, the amount of Vis to get a single roll of the dice, would get you several tractatūs that each (potentially) will teach you more, while carrying no risk of botches.
This obviously assumes a surplus of tractatūs of decent (or better) quality, which may be a bit of a stretch.
More than that. Even if you ignore Covenants, the underlying logic is that a magus is always better off in terms of XP gained by trading (Art score/5, rounded up) pawns of vis for the opportunity to spend a season studying a tractatus of quality (6 + available Aura) than expending that much vis in study. And since studying a tractatus, unlike studying vis, does not expend it, the tractatus will be available for that same trade to another maga.
The result is that if quality tractatus are rare enough that elder magi do routinely study from vis (rather than trading the vis for an opportunity to read a tractatus), then any quality tractatus that do exist will have values measured in rooks of vis. But if quality tractatus are worth rooks of vis, well, there's a massive incentive for anyone who can to spend a season writing one. And they certainly won't wind up mouldering in a covenant library after just one magus reads it.
It is still an open question if typical qualities compete with typical auras. The default aura is 3, but covenants seem more typically to have 5-6, matching a quality of about 11. While Q11 is available in BP design, it is only written by magi with a virtue (Good Teacher or Great Com) and we do not know how common that is, nor do we know how common Communication of the Heroes is. Quite possibly most tractatus are Q7-8 (above average author), with only a few Q11 around, and even Q9 being out of the ordinary.
If you want books to be weaker than vis, you can work with the demographics to support it.
WIth player logic it would be, on average. Well, the first copy would be copied, but player covenants would tend to make sure to get a copy regardless of whether they need it, and if the audience is the high-level magi, there are likely to be fewer readers than copies.
Even if there is one magi a generation who can make Q12+, that person will make a bunch of Tractatus. The magi driving to 30+, would happily trade 3 seasons of access to the Q15 L 15 summae used early on, that is now obsolete, so the super tractatus guy can get to level 10 and write a second tractatus in the specialists pet topic.
If we are in a tractatus poor world, this magi will be bombarded with amazing offers to make tractatii. There's be at least 15, as it's one season to get to level 5, and maybe another 10 or so at least for skill raised to 10+.
Basic market forces mean in a world with few tracatii, the gap in the market should be filled. How good they are is the question, however, even with 1 good teacher a generation, what price vanity? During the magi's life, I'm sure they'd say no copying to maintain the value and get rich. Post death, it's likely any prohibition on copying is removed, and I would think it likely, near the end of the Q12 book writer's life, they may even put conditions on making copies and spreading the books, so their name lives on.
Basic market forces work with large numbers and negligible costs of entry. which, in this particular case, might mean that over a thousand years, the gap has been filled.
I have no doubt that there has been such a magus who may have written a tractatus per art and even one each for magic theory, penetration, and finesse, but this only a fraction of the demand, and after writing 15-18 tractatus, would they care to write more? And if the pay is insanely high, they would have made so much from the first 15-18 that it lasts their lifetime, and have even less incentive.
And then, to make the most money, or rather vis, these authors should keep the books in their own library and have people pay to study there. It is a lot easier to control and less anachronistic than the canon interpretation of cow and calf. Again, this curbs trade, while the books may still exist and be available.
So basic market forces would have been an argument with a million magi, because among those million, there may be a thousand who write good tractatus, and of those thousand, maybe a hundred would actually care to do it, and there are enough tractatus in the market to let the potential clients know that it is worth asking, and keep the price down so that good authors do not have the bonanza that make them retire early.
While the first tractatus is only writable at an Art of 5, the second tractatus is writable at an Art of 6, and the third at 11.
"A character must have a score of at least five in an Art, or at least two in an Ability, before she can write a useful book." but "A character may only write a total number of tractatus equal to half her score in an Ability or one fifth of her score in an Art, rounded up in both cases."
Anyway. If the saga is set up such that there is a paucity of Q11 tractatus, it's easy to create a starting maga immediately able to write multiple tractatus that would be highly valuable to elder magi (Com 2, one minor virtue spent on Good Teacher, a Latin score of 5, and a couple Arts at 6+) with plenty of slack in the character creation budget to make her more than a one-note minmaxed book author.
This isn't inherently unrealistic, but it gets back to my original reply in this thread; under the rules as they exist, you can either make books cheap and watch PCs buy lots of them, or you can make books dear and watch PCs make a fortune selling them.