The Virtual Moleskine

> Moleskine has enormous margins - it doesn’t cost much to make a notebook

> it’s not hard to understand why the company would want to branch out. The stationery-goods industry isn’t exactly fast-growing in this age of Facebook, Twitter, and texting.

Why does every company need to be fast-growing?

What's wrong with a company that supplies a small number of consistently high-quality products to a more or less stable subset of the population, year after year, decade after decade? Why is "enormous margins" not enough?

There are inns in Japan and breweries in Germany that have been around for centuries with relatively little change. They don't give a damn about the fad of the decade, because they know it will pass and be forgotten, just like all the fads of countless past decades. Until recently, Moleskine has been trying pretty hard to make itself look like one of them, the heir to a long line of tradition, loved by Van Gogh and whatnot. (Poor Vincent probably couldn't even afford a Moleskine if he'd lived today, but I digress.)

And then Moleskine started diluting its own brand with cheap, short-lived, bastardized versions of its own flagship product. Yes, they sell a story, and their story used to be okay. Now their story is boring and confusing. It's as if a Hollywood executive has gone through the script and tried to add every cliche that he thinks will help him sell another ticket.

Oh, who am I kidding. We should have seen this from a mile away when a private equity firm bought out the company. No longer owned by its founder and manufacturer, Moleskine has become little but a page in a some anonymous investors' portfolio. After all, the modern Moleskine has only been around for 17 years. Who know whether they'll last another 17 years or not? Better bleed it dry while you still can.

Somewhat tangentially, I've started using $1.35 Moleskine-style notebooks to take notes in classes I care about. I've discovered that as bad as my handwriting is, my attention, focus, and net-gain from classes is significantly higher when all I have is ~8x5 blank paper to distract me.

I don't use Moleskine notebooks per say, but there is a great deal of value in committing to a specific type of stationary. I've been using the big dot pads Rhodia makes for a few years now, and it's nice knowing that I can rip off a sheet and stack it on the others without having to worry about weird crinkling issues or archival degradation. Also, I feel like dots are more helpful for my handwriting than blank pages or lateral ruling. Quadrille is nice too, but once I went with dots, I never went back.

Wow, I've been taken in by their branding - I thought they'd been around for a hundred+ years, not just since 1997.

I'm wondering if there's a more ecologically intelligent version of the Evernote Moleskin... a notebook I can scan and digitize, but uses 100% recycled paper?