
The Virtual Moleskine - prostoalex
http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-virtual-moleskine?src=longreads
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kijin
> _Moleskine has enormous margins - it doesn’t cost much to make a notebook_

> _it’s not hard to understand why the company would want to branch out. The
> stationery-goods industry isn’t exactly fast-growing in this age of
> Facebook, Twitter, and texting._

Why does every company need to be fast-growing?

What's wrong with a company that supplies a small number of consistently high-
quality products to a more or less stable subset of the population, year after
year, decade after decade? Why is "enormous margins" not enough?

There are inns in Japan and breweries in Germany that have been around for
centuries with relatively little change. They don't give a damn about the fad
of the decade, because they know it will pass and be forgotten, just like all
the fads of countless past decades. Until recently, Moleskine has been trying
pretty hard to make itself look like one of them, the heir to a long line of
tradition, loved by Van Gogh and whatnot. (Poor Vincent probably couldn't even
afford a Moleskine if he'd lived today, but I digress.)

And then Moleskine started diluting its own brand with cheap, short-lived,
bastardized versions of its own flagship product. Yes, they sell a story, and
their story used to be okay. Now their story is boring and confusing. It's as
if a Hollywood executive has gone through the script and tried to add every
cliche that he thinks will help him sell another ticket.

Oh, who am I kidding. We should have seen this from a mile away when a private
equity firm bought out the company. No longer owned by its founder and
manufacturer, Moleskine has become little but a page in a some anonymous
investors' portfolio. After all, the modern Moleskine has only been around for
17 years. Who know whether they'll last another 17 years or not? Better bleed
it dry while you still can.

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lukeqsee
Somewhat tangentially, I've started using $1.35 Moleskine-style notebooks to
take notes in classes I care about. I've discovered that as bad as my
handwriting is, my attention, focus, and net-gain from classes is
significantly higher when all I have is ~8x5 blank paper to distract me.

~~~
bane
I agree completely. When I was a student I also eschewed using my computer
during class for a notebook. I might never look at the notes I took again, but
something about going from input to output makes the ideas stick better.

Later when I became a teacher for a short while, I tried to build that kind of
concept into the curriculum to pretty good result.

I wrote some about it here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8253351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8253351)

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jedanbik
I don't use Moleskine notebooks per say, but there is a great deal of value in
committing to a specific type of stationary. I've been using the big dot pads
Rhodia makes for a few years now, and it's nice knowing that I can rip off a
sheet and stack it on the others without having to worry about weird crinkling
issues or archival degradation. Also, I feel like dots are more helpful for my
handwriting than blank pages or lateral ruling. Quadrille is nice too, but
once I went with dots, I never went back.

~~~
lytfyre
I like the dotted paper as well. Rhodia and leuchtturm1917 also both make
moleskine-style notepads with much better paper, less ink show through than
the moleskines.

I've been using a Leuchtturm Link
([http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IYL9044/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IYL9044/))
notebook - the markings are white, on grey paper - when you take a photo of
it, the dots/lines don't show up. They've got an app that does auto
straightening, etc. using markings on the page, as well. It's been working
well for me, far better than my experience with the moleskine evernote.

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damian2000
Wow, I've been taken in by their branding - I thought they'd been around for a
hundred+ years, not just since 1997.

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recalibrator
I'm wondering if there's a more ecologically intelligent version of the
Evernote Moleskin... a notebook I can scan and digitize, but uses 100%
recycled paper?

~~~
amscanne
Isn't recycled paper often worse for the environment when you look at all end-
to-end costs?

(I suspect this would be particularly true if it needed to be white enough for
digitizing.)

~~~
icebraining
You don't need to scan the pages, digital pens are cheap enough nowadays and
some of them work on any paper.

~~~
todd8
How well do these digital pens work out in practice? Are they better than
simply snapping photos of letter or A4 size pages with my iPhone or passing
loose papers through a auto-feed scanner? How about the software that comes
with the pens? Can they produce file formats that are easy to work with (pdf
or plain text) without difficulty on different systems (Mac OS X or Linux).

I've never really been _completely_ satisfied with any system of note taking
(from pens to org-mode) but this is probably more of a poor craftsman blaming
his tools.

~~~
extra88
The pen tracking in my experience isn't perfect so it's probably not better,
in terms of fidelity, than a steady photo with your smartphone but the file
sizes should be smaller and it can be more convenient.

The Livescribe uses a combination of a pen and special paper (you buy it or
you can print it if you have a color laser) not only to record your pen
movements but audio as well. This combination is interesting because your
handwritten notes can serve as a navigation tool for the audio, tap on a note
and it can playback the audio that was recorded at the time. We lend them to
students to try but many find the pen too bulky to write comfortably (I've
only seen photos of the latest model, it looks like it may be a little slimmer
but still relatively bulky).

This site seems to have a decent overview of currently available options (site
design is kind of crap, though). They liked the Sky WiFi pen best, probably
because of its features tied to Evernote but the Wacom Inkling had the best
capture quality ("100%"); its ranking probably suffered because it doesn't
come with any handwriting recognition software. [http://digital-pen-
review.toptenreviews.com](http://digital-pen-review.toptenreviews.com)

~~~
todd8
Thanks for the info, I'm going to check out the reviews.

