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Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

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Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#41

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

walterbell wrote: post #3

> 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 mai…

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.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#42

Post by zenexer »

austinl wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#43

Post by latexr »

austinl wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#44

Post by drums8787 »

austinl wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Also pairs well with a fountain pen & ink hobby.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#46

Post by djbusby »

Here I am using the backs of paper from spammy paper mail (post) held together with a binder clip and the random pen I got from my recent visit to a bank.

The price in these things seems a lot to me. But I also spent money on a Remarkable (which is nice too).

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#47

Post by reaperducer »

siquick wrote: post #40
reaperducer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automatic…

What’s the name of this pen? Sounds incredibly useful

I don't know the brand. (She's traveling right now.) but I know it uses something called "N" notebooks.

Checking Amazon just now shows that Moleskin has one of its own. But I don't know if that's hers.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#48

Post by patrickmay »

zenexer wrote: post #42
austinl wrote: post #30

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…

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 he…

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.

Analog and digital are complementary.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#49

Post by FredPret »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #35
FredPret wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That cannot be true: 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 elsewhe…

> “The CEOs” and “the politicians” are not to blame if the entire system isn’t working. Yes they are. The CEOs and the boards are choosing to focus on maximizing short term profit over the wellbeing of the people in the countries they operate. That's a choice. And the politicians are directly responsible for setting up the rules under which such systems develop. That they allow companies to offshore to other countrie…

Both the politicians and the CEOs are only successful in direct proportion to how well the public responds to their decisions - buying their stuff, voting for their party.

The public wanted cheap imported products, and so now that's what we have.

Re: Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

#50

Post by jim-jim-jim »

austinl wrote: post #30

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…

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.

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