You place your hand on a book or some other collection of written text for 1 minute. During this time, you magically draw the essence of the text and copy it into your mind. Once the spell is complete, the book is unchanged but you mentally retain a visually identical copy of the images and text contained within the book, of up to 500 pages.

Any text written in a language you know becomes immediately familiar to you as if you had read each page recently, but not thoroughly.

Regardless of the language, you also understand which important topics are covered in the text as well as the names of important characters and locations. In addition, you understand the basic structure of the book, as if you had read a table of contents and index in a language you know.

Any time after assimilating a text, you can identically write out the entire book or specific pages as they appeared in the original, even if it was written in a language you do not know. Doing so requires proper inks and parchment, as well as approximately 10 minutes per page and between 2 and 8 hours per image. Any magical properties of the original text cannot be replicated, such as text from a wizard's spellbook, a spell scroll, or a magical tome.