Mod Notebooks’ Launch | Hacker News Reader

Mod Notebooks’ Launch

needwant.com

36 pointsmarshallhaas22 comments

The page loads fast but the images are crawling, they really need to get these things on to a CDN or scale them down to the size they are displayed at (the file size of one of these things that I checked is 2 megabytes, and the server is transferring at 50KB/s or less)

Because their images are: 3264×2448 and they are using the browser to scale.

whoops, need to fix that.

Here's their website: http://modnotebooks.com/

The secret is that you mail the notebooks back to them and they digitize the contents for you.

What happens if the book is lost in transit? Isn't that worse than "forget them forever when I leave it in a dusty box somewhere"?

That would be good statistic for them to list: "1 out of every XX,XXX gets lost in transit". They might use a priority shipping method and pre-addressed box to help prevent that kind of incident.

I personally don't really have a use for the service. A document scanner allows me to use whatever paper I want and scan whatever I want.

It is an interesting idea though if there is a market for this type of service.

I was trying to think of a way to embed a scanner into the front cover of a notebook (with replaceable pages) but it just didn't seem practical, a flatbed or feed scanner works about as good as you're going to get.

Plus, these days you can just take a picture with your phone and be done with it. I do that for whiteboards for content I want to save before erasing them.

That's a good idea. A friend of mine created a little wooden stand and holder for his phone on his desk. Once he's done with a piece, he puts the phone in the holder, swings it around and takes a picture on a delay so he has time to hold the pages down. I believe he also has markings on the desk so he can position his papers/books correctly.

Of course, this might be way more trouble than most people are willing to go through.

I don't understand the attraction to this service. For me, scanning the notebooks would be good if there is some way of intelligently cataloging it, and make it searchable.

I avoid writing stuff in my notebook that I know I need to find in the future. I put into in an email and search it via Google search. Drawings and sketches are different categories. I would scan then and attached it to an email. The message of the email would provide context.

I think what Mod is providing is only half of the solution. At the moment, it is the same as "only to forget them forever when I leave it in a dusty box somewhere", only digitally. For me at least.

Definitely agree with this - but this service combined with handwriting recognition to make notebooks searchable (a la Evernote) would be perfect!

That is almost the final mile problem for this - doing OCR on handwritten notes.

Congrats to the team for a successful launch. I will be interested to see how this scales.

PS: Please make your images smaller - I only saw the first 50% of your images by the time I was done reading

Has the Snapscan scanner or equivalent become uncool for generation Y ?

I personally would never scan every page in my notebook, even if I had a scanner. I would, however, just drop it in the mailbox.

On top of that, Mod uploads it to a nice app which I'd actually used (as opposed to just images on my computer, which I probably wouldn't). I could see them eventually adding OCR and making everything searchable, and cool features like that.

Why do people use K-Cups? Why do people use tea bags instead of tea leaves? Why are microwave/takeout meals so popular? Why are washing machines and dishwashers more popular than doing it by hand? Why are battery powered watches more popular than wind-ups?

One word: Convenience.

It is easy to believe that people will pay for it, just look at the history of the last one hundred or more years. Convenience has trumped almost all other considerations (including enjoyment in a lot of cases).

So the only question that needs to be asked is: is this more convenient than the alternatives (e.g. tablets) or is the lower convenience worth the lower cost relatively speaking? I don't know, but that is the question to be asking.

Love the concept. Too bad their web-site is buggy. When I visit i get a pop-over which reads:

> Not ready to order yet?

> Get 15% off by entering your email address below

Blocking out the web-site and not allowing me to do anything on it (until presumably I give them an email address). In order to view the site at all I had to set display: none from the development bar on div class="modal-background--light js-exitintent-modal-background is-top is-shown" which isn't the best user experience ever.

Not sure why you'd do that? Fortunately it doesn't appear when I visit the site on mobile (or emulated mobile) just PC.

not intuitive, but you can just press escape.

Escape does nothing. I tried changing the focus (background, pop-over, email box, etc) and escaping, still does nothing. Cannot clear it.

Even hitting the "join" button just opens a new tab without closing it.

Title made more sense before changed, as now it seems like it is just launching. Previous title was "Mod Notebooks $91,470 Launch"

why do you have to buy their notebook to get it scanned in? I feel like since the differentiator is the ability to get things digitized, why not just sell the scanning service instead of having to deal with inventory?

I'm not them, but I'd imagine that scanning different form-factors would be more expensive and complex. For example, users now have to measure your books (length, width, and depth) in order to check they're conformant.

Also as the binds have to be cut off to scan, third party books with things like metal ring and plastic binds might be a pain to disassemble.

The margin is in the notebooks not the scanning service.

I love these guys

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