I've been a dedicated Moleskine notebook user as long as I can remember and an Evernote user since it's inception. Since I'm a user of both, I was intrigued by the new Evernote Moleskine notebook. According to Evernote, "This book contains specially formatted paper, designed specifically for use with Evernote". This works with the updated Evernote mobile apps that allow you to capture a camera image as a document. Since I could already take pictures of a standard Moleskine page with the app, I was wondering if there was really something special about the paper, so I ordered one (large ruled format).
I received the new notebook this week and a few people have been asking about it, so here are my thoughts so far.
From the outside, it's a standard Moleskine with the Evernote logo and other interesting images etched into the cover, plus a lime green strap. On the wrapper I noticed that it also includes a 3 month subscription to Evernote premium ($15 value). I'm not a premium user so it will at least get me to try it.
Opening the cover revealed slightly lighter background color and dotted lines compared to the standard pages. I don't really see anything "special" at this point so I decided to create a couple of sample note pages and capture them with the Evernote iPhone app. First I noticed that the ink was absorbing slightly differently between the two pages. I used the same Pilot G2 .05 on both pages. The ink lines were definitely finer on the new pages.
The Evernote Moleskine also includes a selection of stickers to use to tag your notes. I added the home sticker to both pages. Now time to capture the pages with the Evernote iPhone app. Once in the app is in camera mode, you need to enable the document setting instead of the default image. I was quickly frustrated that I had to re-enable this setting every time I wanted to capture a new page. If I'm scanning a paper notebook every day then I'd want to default to document mode, but didn't seem like that was an option.
Just for fun I tried capturing the document images a few different time to test various lighting and flash settings. The only discrepancy I noticed was the stickers did not consistently cause a tag to be added to the note (didn't seem linked to lighting or flash). Out of 6 samples, only one note had a tag added to the note. I probably won't use stickers anyways.
Here's a screenshot of the two different pages in Evernote.
You can see the minor difference in the sharpness of the ink on the Evernote Moleskine paper, but that's about it.
Evernote has always amazed me with the image text parsing for search, and it even does a good job with my terrible writing. Search results were pretty consistent between the two pages. I dismissed any variations to my writing and not the paper.
Conclusion
The large Evernote Moleskine retails at $12 more ($29.95 vs $17.95) than a standard Moleskine. Given that I only noticed a minor difference in ink sharpness I can't see spending an extra $12 for an already expensive notebook, but what about the free (included) premium membership?
Assuming 4 notebooks per year (since you get 3 months of premium per notebook):
(4) Standard Moleskines (with a year of premium): $72 + $45 = $117
(4) Evernote Moleskine (with free premium): $120
So if you use 4 notebooks a year, it will only costs you $3 for the slightly nicer paper. Since I typically only use 2-3 notebooks per year I think I'll stick with the standard Moleskine notebooks for now. I will however leverage the free 3 months of premium service to see if I get any value out of it.
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