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.
> “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 countries and pay the people there much lower wages than the employees they fired is a choice. That they let them pollute in other countries in order to not pay for it is a choice, see the EU's border adjustment for the carbon pricing.
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.
The public often doesn't care about things getting cheaper. They care about things getting more expensive. Those in finance care about things getting cheaper -- to produce. Not to sell. They increase the final margins by continually cost reducing production, while the actual buying public is oblivious until they experience the new product, of which it's production they had no say in. The public reacts to prices reducing by single digit percentages as much as they do the price staying the same, which is to say not at all.
The exception to "people don't want cheaper" is new technology that is conforming production to economies of scale rather than artisan batches as it matures and understanding of production grows. People wanted the prices of 3D printers to come down, and they did as the technology matured. Same with lithium-ion batteries, carbon fiber sheeting, LEDs, and wireless digital transmissions. But for mature technology like a mechanical pencil? No. The price of something like a mechanical pencil was already low enough that reducing the cost further is a detriment to the economy and is not noticed by the end customer. Diminishing returns kick in very very early for the end customer.
For the workers the reduced cost of production to the point of affordability is a boon, as it means more people buy the product, necessitating increased production and thus the increased size of other industries to feed production and an increase in the number of employees. Yet within recent decades the increased profits never go to the employees or taxes. The viewpoint of the executives goes directly against that, since their job isn't to allocate or use the income, only accrue more of it.
There's a balancing act to stay around the limit of "affordable" without being "cheap." Modern first world countries began shifting into services economies in the 1990s because we severely screwed that balance up starting in the late 1970s. The inflation that we've experienced since 1978 is the very aggressive symptom of failing to maintain that balance.
That's an overly simplistic picture. See for example recent tariffs of Chinese EVs to the US. The people buying EVs want cheaper models, but they get tarrifed just the same because the US manufacturers are complacent and far behind, yet again.
People vote against their own interests all the time, all you need is a little propaganda.
People usually vote for lower prices, which translates to lower trade barriers and cheap imports.
But the EV tariff thing is another instance of people voting for their interests, even if the result is the opposite:
US conservatives are a) concerned about Chinese influence and b) rightly or wrongly think tariffs are the least bad form of tax, and at the same time on the left there are very numerous car union members who vote as a bloc and want to protect their jobs. So the easy answer for the politicians - in this case - is to levy tariffs.
But it's all driven by the people and the way they vote and buy.
BTW, 4) is even more easily offshored, because there aren't any physical constraints.
It's hard to move a shipyard with tons of very precise equipment from Sweden to Vietnam.
But it's relatively easy to move a software design team to Vietnam, when the only constraint is a person behind a computer. For a young person in Vietnam making 4 times the average salary is a way more motivating than for a Swede making +30% over the market.
It doesn’t have to work for every country, but there’s a definite trend of ephemeralization. Every time machinery gets a little more automated, computers get a little faster, or the world gets a little more connected… the value of clear thinking, of knowledge work, goes up; the value of unskilled work goes down.
Societies that adapt themselves to this prosper mightily.
The "system" is by and large designed by economical and political elites, and the public discourse they push is shaping what "we want". There is no conspiracy, just a convergence of personal interests. For a while it was to offshore as much as possible to boost short term profits, or artificially increase spending power of the masses before the next election. Now that doesn't work anymore...
It's not just step 4 that failed. Most of the companies I was referring to went bankrupt in the past 30 years or are now empty brands belonging to foreign corps. Their leaders were either delusional to think they could compete on design only, or they didn't care about long term consequences. In all cases they put themselves in a position of not being able to lobby politicians for moves against imported goods.
Not everyone was this shortsighted though, and the ones who resisted the calls for offshoring and survived until now are finally reaping the benefits of their decision.
I want to like Rhodia, but the problem is that their “sheen”-y paper doesn’t cooperate with left-handed writers: it doesn’t like pencil at all but if I write with pen it just ends up smeared everywhere. I’ve had to stick to Stalogy and other companies using Tomoe River (or similar) paper.
Clairefontaine paper has a clay coating that makes it hard and smooth, but causes wet inks to dry slowly and remain prone to smudging. With the right combination of fountain pen and ink, particles of the clay will be dislodged and float up into the pen, eventually clogging the feed. I had one pen+ink combination that would clog up after writing about 2/3 of a page on Clairefontaine paper.
Rhodia paper is made by the same people but has less clay coating, so these problems are a bit less. Still, neither takes pencil well, so I would just use ballpoint or a drier gel on either.
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?
I'm a big fan of MUJI notebooks. Perfect for me on the cost-quality spectrum and they have blank paper options. I have some from high school that still held up.
I spend a fair bit of time out in the woods or on the water, I've become a huge fan of Write in the Rain products, along with Japanese made mechanical pencils. My writing and structure has improved a lot after volunteering with the local marine search and rescue crew. Having to write a lot of logging information for training and missions while cooping with the boat movement and weather adds extra challenge!
I personally prefer Rhodia notepads and notebooks: I prefer the stark whiteness of the paper, the smoother paper, and the 5mm dot grid. Moleskine's marketing is simply too aggressive: they don't sell notebooks, they sell an aesthetic.
I'm not going to claim to be above such marketing tactics: I'm definitely not. But Moleskine's claim to sell authentic Parisian notebooks used by struggling authors is such obvious bullshit.
It reminds me of the 'Original Australian Ugg Boot Company', which is an American business that tried to trademark the name of a generic product made by countless Australian businesses from offcuts of sheepskin. Just as everyone in the southern half of Australia has a pair of Ugg boots (but only Bogans will wear them in public), so those famous authors used moleskine notebooks: they're not good quality products; they're just ubiquitous and cheap.
I have also used Rhodia notebooks in the past. I think they are manufactured in France. Which for me is a plus since one assumes the manufacturing process is kinder and to a high standard.
“Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them”
I give them out. I have far too many moleskine's yet I still buy one every time I'm in a store with them... I just can't stand seeing someone using a crap notebook. So when someone I like comes into my office and they're using some free shit they got as swag from salesforce or w/e, I give them a moleskine and a F-701.
A moleskine is an overpriced crap notebook at this point. Paper quality has drastically diminished from what it used to be, to the point where one can't use fountain or gel pens without bleed through. Another example of enshittification.
"from my own observations because I'm an expert in moleskins and I can tell you exactly why the paper quality has drastically diminished from what it used to be, here is the technique change"
or
"eh, I used a notepad once so I know what I'm talking about"
Because I'm quite sure I know a lot about moleskine, and I'm quite sure you are totally incorrect, a classic is 70gsm, there is no way it wouldn't reject a fp or gel.
Oh yeah, and as a note, I looked at your HN comment history, you might consider a once over of the guidelines, especially: "Please don't post shallow dismissals".
The web is full of independent observations of that exact fact, here's one that even comes with photos [1] but don't let me shatter your illusion. Feel free to keep giving them your money and supporting the enshittification.
"Are Moleskines fountain pen friendly? No. The paper quality is low in general, and fountain pen users will experience ghosting and bleedthrough that prevent you using both sides of the paper, and even some feathering on the front side. There are far better options available, and at a cheaper price."
Pretty much the only moleskine I got, and still use regularly. Is the A5 week to a page diary.
I love that the right hand side of any opening is lined for free form writing. And the thing is small enough to fit in your pocket.
Absolute game changer, I think I'm up to my fourth year in a row now.
Other than that I have used lechturm1917, I really like the numbered pages, but I find it difficult to get in any local bookstore.
Having the pocket diary has changed the way I do notes, so I'm finding I need it less and less.
I'm using a pilot juice-it-up four coloured pen 0.4mm ATM and love it to bits, but the ink runs out way too fast. It would be lovely if someone made a pen that has such vivid colours end flows well without quickly emptying the tank
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).
I write with a Lamy Al-Star EF nib and use take-sume black ink from Pilot; Leuchtturm doesn't bleed at all; doesn't feather either. Moleskine doesn't work nearly as well for fountain pens—too much feathering.
Capless EF, Diamine Red Dragon. We cannot be talking about the same books, my friend ordered one and found the same problem, not sure what they were using. Bled badly with a Pilot C4, as well.
I got a Leuchtturm once out of curiosity. Could only use one side of each sheet. Sometimes it was so bad I had to leave a leaf entirely blank on both sides. Absolutely worthless paper. For a good a5 notebook we are spoiled for choice at that price point. I’ve been enjoying Yu-Sari lately. Where I struggle is finding good paper in a pocket notebook.
Honestly, I now think most people with a Moleskin are doing it primarily for show. They do have nice quality paper, so it's not really a bad choice, only could be better depending on what your exact needs are.
For work I ended at Maruman Mnemosyne and I'm always happy with them. It's a Japanese brand with great paper, nice ergonomics of easily fitting a pen in their spire and plenty of combinations of size and grid pattern.
I got a Moleskine because it seemed to be the nicest thing available in the bookstore when I needed a notebook. Got a small one with fire red cover to write my scratch codes.
(The hope is that whenever I am actually locked out of my accounts and need to find a scratch code in panic, that red notebook is gonna catch my eye faster than any other colour.)
In most bookstores a Moleskine really is the best brand available, so I completely understand your choice. Good luck that you won't need to use the codes though.
My rule of thumb when reading a headline that says "How xx did yy." Is to always wonder "Did xx do yy?"
There doesn't seem to be anything in the article to suggest that these particular notebooks are anything other than fashion accessories and Veblen goods, certainly nothing to suggest any kind of conquering of the "Digital Era".
I have always failed to connect with the Moleskine admiration movement. Every time I go to one of those, kinda upscale, stationary stores, it would be kept there. I end up marvelling at the combination of its sheer inflated price and mediocrity and I end up buying a local notebook (of late that has been Paperkraft).
This is very relatable:
> buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them
I have known people who keep (as they almost always do not use those) Molsekine notebooks just to keep it. They would drag one around meeting to meeting, keep it on their office desks, or in their home and wouldn't fail to talk about it when a chance arises.
I did buy one years ago and it was such a waste of money. It was fit for none of ball, gel, or fountain pens. Their seams are very fragile and ugly - I can see thread peering out and holes stretched already. I tried their even costlier models and no improvement.
The best notebooks I have used over journalising and note taking since mid-late 1990s (when I was a kid) are:
- A few bought in Venice (apparently a very very old family owned store) - I forget the name.
- A local Indian brand Brahma Books which was sold out to a bigger brand and of course stopped making good notebooks
- A notebook my friend brought me from a Walmart or Costco when he returned from USA (he knew I loved writing on paper and he picked one from shelf which was not at all costly). I asked him and he said it was the store brand and not some other brand and cost few dollars iirc.
Any Moleskine I have seen or touched, or the one I used, doesn't even come close to quality of these. I think purchasing and keeping Moleskine in itself is the bobby and the experience. Maybe.
For those in Europe who have a Flying Tiger Copenhagen nearby, their 'Bullet Journal' is a great, cheap notebook (seriously, 5 EUR, compared to 3-4x that for a Moleskine). Dotted, numbered pages. Paper quality is fine, I use a fountain pen so there's a bit of ghosting and a bit of bleed through, but it's only really noticeable if you lift the notebook up and really study the letters.
The only thing I don't like about it is the STUPID lettering on the cover. Just give me a plain, blank cover! They keep doing seasonal ranges with reasonably acceptable covers, but the pages aren't numbered, which, you know, I shouldn't complain about for 5 EUR, but it's just so nearly perfect...
[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...