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.