Ya'll may also want to check out Midori¹, a favorite of the journaling community. There's also Northbooks², a small American company. And Nanami Paper³ if you want to try out quality paper in the ultra-thin direction.
I've been using an MD Notebook A5 Grid with the clear plastic cover, and while I try to treat it gently, I have it in a tote along with a pretty bulky and heavy XPS 17 and it hasn't gotten damaged yet. I love that little notebook and started using it after Moleskin discontinued a hardcover notebook that I really enjoyed.
> From 2005, Leuchtturm.. took on Moleskine, matching them for quality.. older companies like Clairefontaine, Rhodia, and Paperblanks refreshed their offerings. Western hipsters, always alert to high-end Japanese design, started to import notebooks from companies like Midori, Hobonichi, and Stalogy, which bested any of the European brands with their exquisite papers and bindings (Moleskine and Leuchtturm both use mainly Taiwanese paper). In the US, Field Notes struck a utilitarian chord with a mid-century aesthetic. All presented a fresh spin on the basic product, and all benefited from the product building that Moleskine had done.
Stalogy has thin paper with minimal bleed, enabling small notebooks with more pages for writing and reference.
Rhodia and Leuchtturm, and probably others, also have better paper than Moleskine... this is especially noticeable as a fountain pen user.
I'm locked into Moleskine, though: I started using them around 20 years ago, when there wasn't so much competition in the market (or at least not where I lived) and also their paper was better than now. And now I have a long row of them in a shelf, which keeps slowly growing. And they are slightly smaller than other brands (Moleskine pocket notebooks are 90 x 140 mm, Leuchtturm 90 x 150, Rhodia 95 x 140, Stalogy I've never used but from Google search it seems to be 105 x 148). So if I switched brand, the new ones would stick out like a sore thumb.
If anyone knows a brand with better paper but the same size as Moleskine pocket notebooks, I would be grateful.
> (Moleskine and Leuchtturm both use mainly Taiwanese paper)
I guess us Europeans can't even make paper anymore... I hope one day it'll be widely obvious to everyone that the true architects of our impoverishment are these CEOs who organized the offshoring of all our supply chain. But in the mean time we'll probably keep on blaming migrants for a while.
1) A class of people (here it is “the CEOs”) consistently behaving a certain way over time can only be explained by one of two things: a conspiracy (unstable; almost impossible to pull off), or their behavior is shaped by the reality facing them
2) if CEOs consistently offshore manufacturing over decades, this must be because it’s most profitable to do so. This must then be because people elsewhere can make more widgets per dollar / euro of wages, or we’re back to conspiracy theories
3) If workers elsewhere can make widgets cheaper, it’s either because they’re further along in industrializing and have more automation (not the case here) or because they do more work for less money. The blame here is not with the CEO’s, and indeed not with the rich workers either, because they’ve evolved past that point
4) The rich workers should now switch to working at a higher level of abstraction - knowledge work. This way low-wage work gets offshored or automated or ideally both, consumer prices stay low, and wages go up.
If you failed at step 4, that’s because it’s really hard.
Adapting to the post-industrial paradigm is easier with a young population and a culture that celebrates change, neither of which is common or easy to maintain.
“The CEOs” and “the politicians” are not to blame if the entire system isn’t working.
I'm curious about the main use-cases for physical notebooks from folks on HN. I love the idea of physical notebooks, but also have years of digital notes that are searchable and that I can access on any device. I feel like I'm in too deep with digital, and like the ability to access it anywhere.
Has anyone made the switch from digital to physical and loved it? What kind of notes are you taking, how did you get it to stick?
I often go to Barnes & Noble to sit and work on my laptop with a coworker. They have nice seats, no shortage of reference material to settle debates, and happen to be in closer proximity to my office than a library.
One cold winter day, as I was typing out a rough design for a major project, I decided it was just too tedious to work that way. My hands were cold, typing hurt, and my fingers couldn’t keep up with my head. I was trying to track all sorts of interdependent services in my head.
I got up, grabbed a notebook and pen from the shelves, and walked to the checkout counter. Coincidentally, both were Moleskine-branded, but to this day, I know nothing about the company. All I know is that it was far less frustrating to scribble crude diagrams on paper than it was to type them up.
Once I got everything down on paper, I still had to type it all. The scribbles were barely legible to me, let alone the other people on my team.
Pen and paper didn’t replace digital; rather, they augmented it.
This is my experience as well. As PG notes in "Hackers and Painters", figuring out the architecture of a program is more like sketching than engineering. Scribbling in a notebook is more freeing than typing or diagramming on a laptop.
I have 14 years of personal journals and 7 years of programming/math/music notes. I can usually find old entries right away because it's much easier to remember where I was when I wrote it, and why. Part of it is the muscle memory of moving a pen, and part of it is because I would have to care enough about a topic to sit down and put ink to paper in the first place.
A good deal of my technical notes are write-only anyway. Slowing down and jotting things once gave me all the understanding I've ever needed. This is less likely to happen with copy/paste.
I think paper exercises your brain, while these fancy programs attempt to replace it.
I feel like I'm in too deep with digital, and like the ability to access it anywhere.
You can have both.
My wife uses a smart pen that tracks her writing in her notebooks and creates searchable PDFs.
Every couple of months she unloads it via Bluetooth into iCloud and the pages are available everywhere she is.
She recently turned off the pen's built-in OCR after she found that macOS does a much better job of automatically OCRing the pages just by dropping the PDFs into the file system.
I started carrying notebook and pen in my breast pocket when my children were small. I would do a lot of thinking about my work while I was caring for them, and I wanted something to catch my thoughts. Something I could put away instantly when someone needed a push on the swings and pull back out half an hour later, and have it be just as I left it. I still do this occasionally, but these days I can just use a full sized notebook for sketching out ideas.
Nevertheless, I’ve found it incredibly useful to carry a pocket notebook still. Moleskine for a while, but the paper kind of sucks. These days I pick up anything with a sewn binding and hope I get lucky. But anyway, a big reason is social. People react much better when you grab a notebook and start writing than they do if you pull out your phone. One says, “your words are very important to me,” the other says, “I’m ignoring you.”
I use physical notebooks for ephemeral information (i.e. todo lists and ideas). The problem with digital is its convenience: it can grow infinitely without affecting you. There’s nothing to distinguish an old note and a recent one.
A notebook’s pages physically accumulate as they’re written on. It forces me to acknowledge them. If I need to write something new and must skip ten sheets before I find a blank one (I rip out and throw away pages as they’re done), it means there’s a fair amount of unrealised stuff that I haven’t gotten to. Time to reevaluate: read what’s in there and decide what still needs to be in there and what realistically has passed its expiration date of relevance/excitement/importance and should be trimmed.
I have a stack of moleskeine's small flip up art collection sketch pads and take one with me most places. I have one of their music notebooks but that was more aspirational to buy, though I've used it. the use cases include sequence diagrams for processes and code, product ideas, song lyrics, character sketches and story fragments, thoughts I wouldn't put into an electronic device, training diagrams, etc. I write and draw to think and reason things through, and the notebooks are essential to that.
Been filling notebooks for years while also keeping pretty meticulous digital notes. Physical is mostly personal or ideas (sometimes for work). Digital is mostly work.
I like to doodle and draw alongside note-taking and there's no substitute for analog there IMO. Plus, being able to write and not be on a device after a long day at work is a relief.
Lack of search can be an issue. But then I sometimes create indexes to things like book notes or stuff I'm learning and that is a pleasure in itself.
Two reasons. 1: you retain more information writing it down on physical paper. 2: I have never needed to search ancient notes, most last a couple weeks at the longest, and thanks to point #1 you know where things are in that notebook better than you’d guess.
Handwriting recognition is still very hit-or-miss. The best results I've had so far are by running the handwriting through the Google Cloud Vision API, and then asking ChatGPT to fix transcription mistakes. The problem with that is that effectively you are asking it to hallucinate.
It's great at producing something that sounds a lot like what I might have written, but I can't trust anything that it says, because it frequently hallucinates numbers, dates, people's names—the exact kind of thing that I take notes to have a good record of.
I love my Maruman Mnemosyne 105 (not the 182 which is single sided) notebooks (I've been using them for years). The great thing about them is that the paper is thin but there is no bleed through even with fountain pens.
They're also much more practical for ideating than a Leuchtturm because they are perforated for tearing off. With a Leuchtturm there is a hesitation to write because you don't want to waste paper or mess up a nice notebook, but the Mnemosyne there is no such hesitation (even though it's nice paper).
Also, although I've been a fountain pen enthusiast for years (LAMY, TWSBI, Pilot), I find I can get the same quality of writing from a inky rolling ball pen like the Pilot Precise V5 RT. They're much cheaper and easier to carry around than a fountain pen.
I prefer notebooks with rings at the top (A5 or A6). I think being left-handed also plays a role in this preference, as it makes writing more comfortable for me.
I think the notebook itself is secondary to the system employed for note taking. For me bullet journaling changed what I do inside a notebook roughly 10 years ago. Today I have moved back to scratch-your-own-itch digital tool to manage a bullet journal with markdown syntax: https://github.com/coezbek/rodo
The A4 hardback with square dotted paper is really nice. Before I moved my notes into text files, I used to put everything into mine. Work notes, sketches, plans, etc etc. Leuchtterm make gorgeous notebooks.
Fascinating! I myself am partial to the Muji lay flat notebooks.
Question: how can I find a printer to make my own? I run a small business making staff paper notebooks. I want to make lay flat, thread + tape bound ones. How can I find a printer that can help me replicate? (I also want to launch a line of cheap mead-like notebooks, but similarly have trouble figuring out how to get those done.) most places will do spiral, wire-o, or saddle stitch with essentially copy paper but I’d like to be able to make these more specialized items.
I’m not 100% sure I can help here, but the company I work for, we work with a printer / producer / manufacturer in Ecuador. If you’d like to shoot me an email with what you’d like to produce, I can see if it’s something they can make. (We manufacture fair trade goods, working with some producers, including notebooks… so this might be within the realm. I think the hardest part would be getting the exact paper you would want).
My email is in my profile.
(Also not entirely altruistic as I struggle to find notebooks I love, and frequently revert back to legal pads which just don’t work quite the same).
100% agree with the muji ones. I buy the planner every year. I do most of my organisation and most of my thinking work on a hoard of a two foot thick slab of muji squared paper and enough gel pen refills to last 20 years.
Mind sharing more about your business? How did you end up doing that? Are you competitive at all on prices or are you mostly benefit from the fact that it's a local product for your niche market?
Readit News
[1]: https://md.midori-japan.co.jp/en/products/mdnote-cotton/
[2]: https://gonorthbooks.com/
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Cafe-Note-Tomoe-River-Journal/dp/B073...
Stalogy has thin paper with minimal bleed, enabling small notebooks with more pages for writing and reference.
I'm locked into Moleskine, though: I started using them around 20 years ago, when there wasn't so much competition in the market (or at least not where I lived) and also their paper was better than now. And now I have a long row of them in a shelf, which keeps slowly growing. And they are slightly smaller than other brands (Moleskine pocket notebooks are 90 x 140 mm, Leuchtturm 90 x 150, Rhodia 95 x 140, Stalogy I've never used but from Google search it seems to be 105 x 148). So if I switched brand, the new ones would stick out like a sore thumb.
If anyone knows a brand with better paper but the same size as Moleskine pocket notebooks, I would be grateful.
I guess us Europeans can't even make paper anymore... I hope one day it'll be widely obvious to everyone that the true architects of our impoverishment are these CEOs who organized the offshoring of all our supply chain. But in the mean time we'll probably keep on blaming migrants for a while.
1) A class of people (here it is “the CEOs”) consistently behaving a certain way over time can only be explained by one of two things: a conspiracy (unstable; almost impossible to pull off), or their behavior is shaped by the reality facing them
2) if CEOs consistently offshore manufacturing over decades, this must be because it’s most profitable to do so. This must then be because people elsewhere can make more widgets per dollar / euro of wages, or we’re back to conspiracy theories
3) If workers elsewhere can make widgets cheaper, it’s either because they’re further along in industrializing and have more automation (not the case here) or because they do more work for less money. The blame here is not with the CEO’s, and indeed not with the rich workers either, because they’ve evolved past that point
4) The rich workers should now switch to working at a higher level of abstraction - knowledge work. This way low-wage work gets offshored or automated or ideally both, consumer prices stay low, and wages go up.
If you failed at step 4, that’s because it’s really hard.
Adapting to the post-industrial paradigm is easier with a young population and a culture that celebrates change, neither of which is common or easy to maintain.
“The CEOs” and “the politicians” are not to blame if the entire system isn’t working.
Has anyone made the switch from digital to physical and loved it? What kind of notes are you taking, how did you get it to stick?
- I became frustrated with digital sketching. Too clumsy.
- I wanted to be creative and flesh out ideas without being next to a computer.
- I found a comfy brand of notebook I enjoy using. In the past, notetaking never stuck with me because I didn't like the notebooks.
One cold winter day, as I was typing out a rough design for a major project, I decided it was just too tedious to work that way. My hands were cold, typing hurt, and my fingers couldn’t keep up with my head. I was trying to track all sorts of interdependent services in my head.
I got up, grabbed a notebook and pen from the shelves, and walked to the checkout counter. Coincidentally, both were Moleskine-branded, but to this day, I know nothing about the company. All I know is that it was far less frustrating to scribble crude diagrams on paper than it was to type them up.
Once I got everything down on paper, I still had to type it all. The scribbles were barely legible to me, let alone the other people on my team.
Pen and paper didn’t replace digital; rather, they augmented it.
Analog and digital are complementary.
A good deal of my technical notes are write-only anyway. Slowing down and jotting things once gave me all the understanding I've ever needed. This is less likely to happen with copy/paste.
I think paper exercises your brain, while these fancy programs attempt to replace it.
You can have both.
My wife uses a smart pen that tracks her writing in her notebooks and creates searchable PDFs.
Every couple of months she unloads it via Bluetooth into iCloud and the pages are available everywhere she is.
She recently turned off the pen's built-in OCR after she found that macOS does a much better job of automatically OCRing the pages just by dropping the PDFs into the file system.
Nevertheless, I’ve found it incredibly useful to carry a pocket notebook still. Moleskine for a while, but the paper kind of sucks. These days I pick up anything with a sewn binding and hope I get lucky. But anyway, a big reason is social. People react much better when you grab a notebook and start writing than they do if you pull out your phone. One says, “your words are very important to me,” the other says, “I’m ignoring you.”
A notebook’s pages physically accumulate as they’re written on. It forces me to acknowledge them. If I need to write something new and must skip ten sheets before I find a blank one (I rip out and throw away pages as they’re done), it means there’s a fair amount of unrealised stuff that I haven’t gotten to. Time to reevaluate: read what’s in there and decide what still needs to be in there and what realistically has passed its expiration date of relevance/excitement/importance and should be trimmed.
I like to doodle and draw alongside note-taking and there's no substitute for analog there IMO. Plus, being able to write and not be on a device after a long day at work is a relief.
Lack of search can be an issue. But then I sometimes create indexes to things like book notes or stuff I'm learning and that is a pleasure in itself.
Also pairs well with a fountain pen & ink hobby.
Deleted Comment
Paper and physical notebooks offer motor memory and time delay before data ingestion by cloud analytics.
It's great at producing something that sounds a lot like what I might have written, but I can't trust anything that it says, because it frequently hallucinates numbers, dates, people's names—the exact kind of thing that I take notes to have a good record of.
So I've given up and only use paper now.
They're also much more practical for ideating than a Leuchtturm because they are perforated for tearing off. With a Leuchtturm there is a hesitation to write because you don't want to waste paper or mess up a nice notebook, but the Mnemosyne there is no such hesitation (even though it's nice paper).
https://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-N105-Notebook-A5-D...
Also, although I've been a fountain pen enthusiast for years (LAMY, TWSBI, Pilot), I find I can get the same quality of writing from a inky rolling ball pen like the Pilot Precise V5 RT. They're much cheaper and easier to carry around than a fountain pen.
https://www.target.com/p/pilot-3ct-precise-v5-rolling-ball-p...
It’s astonishing how much these branded notebooks cost. They must have great margins, not just Moleskine as described in the article.
Question: how can I find a printer to make my own? I run a small business making staff paper notebooks. I want to make lay flat, thread + tape bound ones. How can I find a printer that can help me replicate? (I also want to launch a line of cheap mead-like notebooks, but similarly have trouble figuring out how to get those done.) most places will do spiral, wire-o, or saddle stitch with essentially copy paper but I’d like to be able to make these more specialized items.
My email is in my profile.
(Also not entirely altruistic as I struggle to find notebooks I love, and frequently revert back to legal pads which just don’t work quite the same).
I’d paused it for the past couple of years but am bringing it back! Just scratching my own itch.