When it comes to books, I am a bit of a fetishist. I really appreciate books as physical objects. This appreciation is quite separate from any appreciation of the ideas that may be contained within a book.
This appreciation carries over to notebooks, too.
For a while now, I have been scribbling down my poetry, blog ideas, business plans, and shopping lists in Moleskine notebooks. I appreciate the quality of construction that goes into a Moleskine, and there is something about the creaminess of the paper that makes writing in a Moleskine a very pleasant sensation.
The one thing that I don’t like about Moleskines is that they’re very expensive, as notebooks go. Depending on where you’re shopping, a large standard-sized Mokeskine can cost as much as $25 CAD. That’s very pricey, but I’ve been willing to pay the cost because I like the notebooks so much.
Recently, while shopping at Notables, I found an alternative to the Moleskine: Ecosystem Notebooks.
The Ecosystem is almost identical to the Moleskine, but comes with a number of advantages:
- it’s less expensive (by about 30-40%)
- it is environmentally-friendly (most materials are 100% recycled),
- you can register your notebook to help track it down if you lose it.
Registration also allows you to find out additional information about the carbon footprint of your book, where it was made, and even how many people were employed in the production of your Ecosystem notebook.
The one possible disadvantage is that the pages are perforated for easy removal. While this is occasionally a convenient feature, more often it just makes me worried that pages will be accidentally torn out.
Having said that, I haven’t had any problem with pages coming out of the book when I didn’t intended them to, so perhaps this will prove a non-issue.
As long as the perforated pages don’t cause problems, I think Ecosystem notebooks will become my new staple. Sorry Moleskine, but it looks like someone has created a better—and a greener—notebook than you.
4 Comments
also – moleskins are leather (aren’t they?). and that’s bad (if you’re one of THOSE people).
Actually, they’re coated cardboard (or paper, for the softcover ones). I think the coating is some kind of vinyl.
I love notebooks and have a small collection of them. These sound interesting…curious as to how they hold up in the long run. I’ve never had anything last as long as a Moleskine. I use 80-cent Hilroy notebooks for serious writing because they’re big, lay flat, and have wide margins.
I’m curious as to how they’ll hold up in the long run, too. I haven’t had this one long enough to know for sure, but I suspect that it’ll do almost as well as a Moleskine. It really does seem to be a nearly identical product, except for the points I listed in the post, so hopefully the quality is the same.