I spend way more money on jetpens's selection of notebooks than pens though. Also, I tend to prefer pencil, and will recommend the Pentel Kerry. --------- I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The future of online stores is jetpens and websites like it. Jetpens is useful because I trust their reviews. They're a store, yes, but more importantly, they're a trustworthy source of information. Amazon reviews are no…
When I was a student I think I read online that (for water based inks) laser printer paper works well and better than a lot of notebook paper. I think something about feathering or drying time but I don’t really remember. I’m not sure how true it was and I preferred having loose leaf paper with no lines so I was pretty happy feeling like I was getting well suited paper on the cheap.
If you're making your own notebook out of printer paper, I suggest you spend $10 on a 2-point hole punch and then buy the 2-point binders, which is far superior over staples. This should get you a good binding for personal use (sized for ~10 pages to 100 pages or so) with only 10-cents or so for the binding. Still, this gets you a "notebook" of size 8.5 x 11, which is too large for most purposes. (3-hole punch binders are a bit too big / heavy in most purposes in my experience, the 2-hole punch methods / folders / binders are superior for most purposes)
Folding in half is usable, but now you gotta cut the edge if you want the paper to line up right. I guess good for ~10 sheets (20 pages after folding), but any more and things are pretty bad in my experience.
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B5 notebooks are just the right size: fitting inside of purses, my desk on the go. They're also auto-numbered (If you're buying higher-priced ones like LEUCHTTURM1917), come with built-in bookmarks, and come in a variety of styles (lines, dots, or plain).
The main advantage to "making your own" is the ability to print out whatever design you want (ex: music sheets, or in my case... breadboarding plans for electronics). So I still make my own notes with 2-point binder + 8.5x11 paper these days.
But for typical note-taking / day-to-day use, nothing beats a properly sized B5 notebook or pocket "Field Notes".
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Auto-numbering is a surprisingly important thing in my experience, to the point that I have bought an automatic counting machine (aka: a stamp that auto-increments). This is useful not only for page numbers, but also for lists within a page. It turns a $2 Walmart notebook into something usable for work and is cheaper than buying a fancy pre-numbered notebook.
Still though, those higher-quality notebooks from Jetpens are just really, really nice. And the fact that they have tested their paper and pages with a variety of inks, pens, and pencils with photographic proof is proof of Jetpen's quality of information.