[mangeletti]

You can already do this with the Moleskine Smart Notebook, except you don't have to mail your private notebook to a 3rd party company for scanning - you can scan them directly into Evernote with the free Evernote app.

tl;dr

The exact same thing exists by Moleskine at http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-journals/evernote/

[j0ncc]

This is actually the pain point we were trying to solve with mod. Each time we'd fill up a notebook we'd manually take pictures of every page and save it to evernote. If you've ever done this you'll know...

- It takes FOREVER.

- Pictures are blurry / out of focus / misaligned

- There's a limit to the number of pictures you can attached to a note in evernote so each notebook ends up needing to be spread between a few different evernote "notes".

- Evernote really isn't designed to consume this kind of content. (We have an app designed specifically for this: http://app.modnotebooks.com/demo)

[kaplejon]

Hey Jon, really appreciate you posting about these pain points. I have been trying to get behind your notebooks since the launch last week, but as a user of the Moleskine notebooks I'm just not seeing the value add you guys are promoting. Hopefully you can help me see through my own myopia.

My workflow usually takes me through a few pages of a notebook, which I then scan immediately afterwards into an Evernote note, specific to whatever I was just working on. I often recap with dictation, and possibly add some new thoughts, but I'm never adding more than a few scanned pages at a time. So for me, it never feels like it takes "forever", nor do I have issues with image limits.

I guess, for me, and probably for many other people, we have felt like the real-time nature and benefit is lost. Maybe I don't fill notebooks as quickly as the next guy, but by the time I do, I usually don't have any need to search through most of my earliest pages. By sending the notebook away once it is full, the scanning seems to add limited additional value to me. And barring physical destruction of the notebooks, the archival value of being able to ship the whole notebook for scanning feels a bit forced to me.

Plus, I write primarily in script, and the OCR works just fine, so I don't feel the images are necessarily blurry/out of focus either.

I understand you have many users already on-board with the idea. And that's great. I'm not trying to say your product or concept is invaluable. You're a project I want to support, I just can't personally get behind you with my current perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why someone with my perspective might want to switch to your notebooks.

Thank you.

[j0ncc]

Hey!

Really appreciate the feedback.

For me the value is in knowing everything is backed up and saved. I very rarely actually need access to my old notes and sketches from previous notebooks but there’s a lot of sentimental value there for me.

If a note I take is actually time sensitive or needs to be referenced soon, I still have the physical notebook to reference.

I have (low quality photos of) sketches of old ideas that later become companies. The notebooks themselves are long gone but I love that I still have some kind of digital backup.

I’d eventually like to get the price of mod notebooks down so they’re on par with other notebooks that don’t have the digitizing bundled in (it’s already pretty close).

[kaplejon]

Jon, the sentiment makes a lot of sense. And anyone reading HN should know the importance of having a backup/archive system setup before it's needed. I guess that really is the ease of mind that I would consider buying.

Between writing my earlier message and reading your response here, I think the idea of having a strategy less dependent on myself is in fact compelling.

Well, shoot. Now it looks as though I am of the mindset that I will buy one just to give it a fair trial. Thank you again for another quality and personal response.

[not_that_noob]

Nice job guys. Really well thought out and well designed. You guys are top notch.

[not_that_noob]

Not even close. tl;dr: read what you're posting before you post it.

From the Moleskine webpage: "Write, sketch, or draw in the specially designed Evernote Notebook by Moleskine. Take a photo of any page in this Moleskine notebook with the Evernote Page Camera and it instantly becomes digital so that you can save it, search it and share it with the world."

In other words, painful as hell. Mod is an elegant and well-designed solution to this issue.

[nitrogen]

What is the difference between an ordinary Moleskine and the Evernote Moleskine? I couldn't figure it out from that product page.

[joshdance]

Evernote can recognize the stickers. But really it is just branding. I liked how it looked and I liked both companies so I bought it.

[marshallhaas]

Basically nothing aside from the branding. They do however give you stickers to help with tagging.

[nitrogen]

Does the software automatically recognize the stickers? That would be helpful, I suppose.