Moleskine Smart Writing Set | Hacker News Reader

Moleskine Smart Writing Set

moleskine.com

67 pointsjoubert46 comments

Solving the wrong problem. Moleskine is losing market share to companies like Leuchtterm because the quality of their products (especially the paper) has been in steady decline. People who care about writing in journals care a lot. They buy bottles of imported fountain pen ink. They have long conversations about paper acidity and copperplate vs. roundhand. They will not buy your cludgy pen or limit themselves to an expensive journal that doesn't care about any of that. The "new feature" you're advertising is already available to anyone with a camera-equipped smartphone. Your only potential customers have already tried the dozens of cheap high-quality software solutions for digitizing, analyzing, cleaning up, and distributing photographs and other digital representations of what they write or draw in their own journals with their own pens. And they're definitely saavy enough not to tie themselves to an expensive low-quality replacement that'll be discontinued in two years when Moleskin decides they're going to try to compete in the presentation whiteboard space instead.

tbh, I went from using nice little notebooks like Moleskines and such to just using a decent notes app on my Galaxy Note 3. It's about the same height/width, thinner, can email me pdfs of all my notes once I'm done and oh, btw, I have it on me all the time anyway (and it happens to be a phone and can run apps and do other things).

The only thing this shows me is that it makes me carry around another couple things (an expensive notebook and pen) and offers worse performance for the things I use the Note 3 for anyway.

The electronic pen solutions are all kludgy, but calling a smartphone a viable alternative is ridiculous. I might take a dozen pages of notes in a sitting; I'm not going to sit there and use a finicky smartphone camera to take a picture of each page one at a time. Also, the camera method loses important about strokes. Livescribe, Moleskin, and Wacom all use that information to improve handwriting recognition.

I should have been more clear: I call it a viable alternative because the workflow and quality is certainly no worse, and it is far less expensive. I agree that it's not ideal, and I only use it perhaps a dozen times a year. When I need a good digital format I do what everyone else does: use a computer or tablet. 95-99% of the stuff in my journal is already in its appropriate target medium: my journal. That's why it's in my journal.

I tend not to digitise other than scanning the occasional opening for future reference and I agree with the sentiments expressed in the parent post.

However I must disagree about specific brands...

"Moleskine is losing market share to companies like Leuchtterm because the quality of their products (especially the paper) has been in steady decline."

UK: Leuchtterm notebooks cost an arm and a leg here as do Rhodia.

Generic A5 sketch books in arts supply shops cost around £5 for 80 sheets of acid free 100 g/m^2 paper signature bound in boards or £2 for stapled 20 sheet booklets with cardboard covers. Not as trendy as Moleskines but very serviceable and pen-proof - you can even paint in them (by design).

Yep. I don't need rules or grids for a lot of tasks, so I often just buy bound sketchbooks. But I was talking about market-share, and a significant chunk of the share Moleskine has been losing are the former "vrai moleskine" customers who care not only about actual quality but conspicuous consumption.

> Moleskine is losing market share to companies like Leuchtterm because the quality of their products (especially the paper) has been in steady decline.

Truly. I can't wait until I fill up my last of two moleskine notebooks that were given to me a few years ago. The paper is barely better than Mead or Staples-brand writing pads though the binding and covers look nice. Leuchtterm, Rhodia, and even Black and Red are all better paper and have more durable bindings.

Back n' Red's are my go to note taking pads (specifically the hard back spiral bound A4 books [0]). These work really well with my cheapo Parker Vector fountain pen [1] which I bought to replace my (sadly lost) Waterman Carene :(

[0]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000N3WR96

[1]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000RGHIVQ

Just a small nitpick, it's called 'Leuchtturm' (lighthouse), 'turm' beeing 'tower' in German. Their solution for digitizing notes is called "whitelines" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXiZgVaRkSM

Edited. Thanks. I want points for remembering the two 't's though.

Just remember "leucht-turm" as "lighT-Tower".

Too late to edit. Note that I misspelled <Long German (Dutch?) Word>. 'Leuchtturm'. I think.

I personally prefer paper. The idea is nice but reaching a perfect product is hard. I won't buy this, some thoughts:

- the pen is too big and low quality. It makes click noises when writing.

- you can't use any pen you want and writers like their pen (ballpoint, etc.).

- the battery lasts a week or so (not that much). When you use a pen you don't want to have to think about it (like with watches).

- not fast enough, sometimes it doesn't start quickly enough so you loose some words.

- not worth the 200$. The price is higher than some very capable full tablets with a pen.

- you can't use any notebook, you have to use their tablet notebook and buy it every time for 30$ or so.

- 229€ vs. 200$ (unfair as usual...)

So there's still work to do but one day this technology will be ready :)

These guys: http://www.iskn.co/ Have a similar product that is compatible with any notebook and any pen.

Not sure how the Moleskine works but this one is an "active system": you need a device gathering the data while you draw but it's definitely worth taking a look.

Cool stuff (plus they're French !). I wonder how this works with a standard thick notebook (with hard cover). Can I just put the slate beneath it ? And you still need to carry the slate.

One concern though, it's only made for Apple iOS gadgets which is a bit useless because Apple newest iPads (Pro) have this included...

It should just work in the cloud and be available on the web before anything else.

Seems like an interesting product. They should rework their website though -- the website was slow to load and very annoying to read, I left it in very short time.

That is astonishingly close to my ideal. Android compatibility and a normal clipboard style clip and I think I'd be breaking out Fry-take-my-money.png

> 229€ vs. 200$ (unfair as usual...)

EU prices tend to include sales (VAT) taxes. Does that US price include the sales tax?

> EU prices tend to include sales (VAT) taxes. Does that US price include the sales tax?

No it doesn't, because that's usually a state by state thing.

We've spent decades trying mimic physical notebooks with electronics - Moleskine is one step ahead, the hipster of the hipsters, they are already making paper notebooks "mimic the shape and look" of a digital tablet. What a time to be alive!

It looks like you need to press very hard. I expect that people's fingers will get tired and stiff.

Why not just take a picture of your paper? Ideally, they could just put some special markers on the corners of the page, and then a phone app could home in on those to properly focus and align the page. Problem solved.

The other thing is, why make the pen communicate with the device (e.g. tablet) in real time? This seems like a waste of power, and not practically useful [1]. You could simplify it by just having a button on your pen that, when you click, sends over the aggregated line data.

[1] I suppose one use case is to share in real-time with some kind of audience, but this is already a solved problem with a stylus on a laptop or tablet... why add the extra cost of special paper?

You're basically describing this: http://whitelines.se/link/

I've bought the paper, which is nice, but haven't used the app.

I have a Leuchterm notebook with Whitelines. It's not bad, the app works reasonably well. It's just doing fiducial detection and some perspective undistortion, pretty much out of the box OpenCV.

This works excellent.

Another reason to love it is they provide their app for free as well as downloadable and printable pdfs of their special paper.

Seems they make money on the convenience of buying ready-made stacks of this paper as well as whiteboard magnet kits that allows you to use normal whiteboards with their app.

(And yes, I love it and have occasionally used it but I am otherwise unaffiliated.)

>Why not just take a picture of your paper?

Moleskine has this in partnership with Evernote.

Onenote has an app called Office Lens.

Additionally, this has already been done. Livescribe has the exact same product. By the looks of it, it's better.

I've got a Livescribe gathering dust somewhere, which is basically what this looks like. Decent idea, just didn't quite fit the way I work.

I had to give up on moleskine because I use fountain pens and the paper is just awful!

Ironic, the iconic paper notebook is of such low quality paper.

actually, they're not that iconic:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featur...

I love the way marketers package a complete bare faced brazen lie as "not the absolute truth"

Because if there's one thing the world needs, it's paper with DRM.

I have been searching for the holy grail of note taking for a while now. I switch from analog to digital and back like a manic note taker. This sounds very promising.

Same story here... Tried lots of different combos. Nothing was quite right. Just picked a 12" iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. It's been fantastic! I'm glad I tried the 12, it's pretty much the size of a piece of paper. Now apps are still limited but it's a new favorite for me.

Does that feel right when you write on it? My main complaint with any stylus type input is that it feels like you are writing on ice. The tip just slides around and makes it more trouble than it is worth. Did Apple fix that?

For a cheaper & smaller alternative, also worth looking at the Samsung Galaxy Tab A with S-Pen 8.0. Convoluted name, but I love it, and it is dramatically cheaper than an iPad Pro. I think it compares favorably too, I've tried both & I don't feel the Galaxy Tab lags too far behind the iPad Pro in latency. I'm not a heavy writer, but for me it has replaced paper note-taking during phone calls or webinars, or times when I need to sketch or write an idea out on paper (sometimes I find typing doesn't help me solve a coding problem, but writing with a pen does - writing on the Galaxy Tab is giving me that same mental shift). And of course it syncs with Evernote & you can resize/move objects you've sketched and all the other good things.

I use cheap 5mm A4 pads, a decent gel pen and CamScanner for android.

Since I always have my phone on me the 'scanner' part is essentially portable and the pads cost me about 70p each.

It works well for me anyway.

Interesting - can I ask you how what you do with the images of your pads? Do you just keep it in folders or do you insert them in to some note taking program?

I just keep them all in Dropbox folders by Year/Month/Day so 2016/04/10

Why not just write in a nice notebook/journal and take photos to upload to Onenote or Evernote?

I just use a scratch piece of paper and toss it at the end of the day.

Anything that's useful enough to keep is useful to other people too, so that goes into the team wiki.

You can print your own paper on a color laser printer with their Windows program. http://www.neosmartpen.com/en/products/n_toaster So, you don't need to use Moleskine, if you don't want to.

The pen, separately, is $170 on Amazon.

I actually really dislike the Moleskine pens.. really poor quality, alas.

(Amazon reviews seem to agree!)

"A notebook with a distinctive design and rounded pages that project beyond the cover to mimic the shape and look of a digital tablet."

from http://www.moleskine.com/microsites/smartwritingset/descript...

So ridiculous it reads like an April 1st joke.

I think they should focus on making paper notebooks instead of adapting technologies that have failed many times before.

so we pay $200 for a notebook and electronic pen to store and notes and forget about them.

You still have the notes in the notebook, it's just that note you have a digital and more portable backup. If you're going to forget about the notes then this product isn't the issue.

You might be forgetting about them.

For others notes are crucial parts of our workflow and projects.

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