Don't want to open a feature request on bugs.scribus.net till I've asked about the possibility of this.
I have my autosave set quite frequent as i'm using 1.3.4 for production work (tut tut!) and it has an annoying habit of falling over a few second before i remember to save myself. But on a 32 page document it can take 3 minutes to save. (Wonder if the squeek coming from my hard drive slows it down!). Which can be a bit frustrating. However what is even more frustrating is that with a 10min auto save on (and only being able to work for 7 of those minutes - I often find when I re-open scribus from minimised (I've maybe edited a document in OO.o - I know its been sat unchanged for 20 minutes so why is it autosaving at the point I open it? Could there be a flag someplace which says 'file changed since last (auto)save' and if it = yes autosave runs if it = no then autsave isn't needed. I'm not sure how easy that is for the software to then set the flag every time the doc is changed... Does that make sense. gedit (text editor) on Ubuntu does this (somehow) where the save icon is disabled if you've not made changes. As soon as you make changes it is enabled == means at a glance I can see if I've edited a file.
