[nbadg]

As an aside, I really wish there were something that really, truly duplicated the experience of pen and paper, but were digitally indexable and searchable. There's just something really special about the tactile feedback. I also really like the way I can bounce between two arbitrary pages extremely rapidly with a physical notebook, or even look at two at once.

Plus, depending on how well you remember what, rapidly searching for a given entry is way faster if you flip to the approximate point in a physical book. That's my biggest complaint about my Kindle: random access is incredibly slow; in a physical book I've read within a year or so, I can reliably find a quote I was looking for within 30 seconds, but on my Kindle it takes forever.

[thr0waway1239]

Maybe you know about the LiveScribe SmartPen:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00524DLZ0/

This was a really nice product, until the company decided to go for the "smartphone app" experience and changed everything about it drastically. I sought out and bought the older version (the second gen) because it actually had all the features I expected.

The concept is out there, but with the following improvements you can get the experience you seek: make the pen slimmer and more natural to hold, make the special paper look more like normal paper, and have a pen dock which does all the magic of syncing and creation of digital notes etc. Bonus if it were somehow possible to replicate the pixelation of the special notebook on a carbon-paper style sheet so that you can just use whatever notebook you wanted and insert this special sheet underneath.

Also about random access: I have always wondered why the eReader software never has a mode where when you scroll on the play head, it shows the current page, plus 2 pages before and 3 after (all displayed as smaller thumbnails, sort of like Netflix). Wouldn't that be at least a little closer to the flipping experience?

[nbadg]

Stuff like the LiveScribe is close, but not quite, what I want. I think at the moment one of the most likely candidates is actually something with AR. Plus, it would just be really stupendously cool to have a blank notebook that is "full" of AR writing.

Talk about invisible ink.

[blcArmadillo]

While reading your comment I was reminded of this method [1] I saw awhile back of having an index in the back of a notebook and marking the edge of pages at the point of the corresponding index item. It's an interesting concept if you don't need a ton of granularity in your ability to search.

[1] http://www.highfivehq.com

[nbadg]

That's super clever too. Man, my notebook game is getting so much better today.

[ChuckMcM]

I also use a set of colored posit "pointers" that I tag pages with, red for action items, blue for web site ideas, green for the current project and yellow for possibly patentable Ideas