Editing The Pen Addict 351/transcript (section)

== Future of Smart Pens ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think that's a good way to look at it. I like that. Yeah. Like I said, we're five to 10 years away from... Yeah. I think we would have either had something now or what... But what we've seen is no one's even close.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And I bet that this product sells more than well enough for them just for people wanting the coolness factor of their pen going onto their phone, right? Like I would have bought this if I was still at the bank, like 100% I would have bought this. Yeah. Oh, one last thing. Talk about lock-in. Talk about lock-in. That's another reason for this, by the way. Yeah. Because you get in on this system, all you can use is the Moleskine pens and the Moleskine notebooks. That's all you can use.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, and the Adobe Creative Cloud, which when they moved to subscription service a few years ago, I mean, that was just a great move by them, honestly.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That saved their business. But yeah, if you remember, they did this, they had a partnership like this with Evernote before.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. But it was more scannables, wasn't it? Like, I think it was... No, it was a smart notebook. Did it? That's right. It had the theoretical tap the corner type of system. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about real notebooks, can we? Yeah, sure. I got some cool new ones I wanted to talk about. So I've, as always, the pen addict mailbox overfloweth. And I like talking about new and neat products that I haven't seen before or haven't had a chance to test out before and shine a little light on some of these small makers that are doing cool things. And the first one is these North of Rosemont notebooks. So I teased it out on Twitter last night, took a couple pictures. And this is a brand I had never heard of. They're based in Montreal, Canada. And they reached out to me, said, hey, this is what we're doing. Here's a link to all our stuff. We'd love to send you some notebooks if you're interested. So I dug around, dug around the site. I was like, oh man, these look nice and neat and clean. And I was like, yeah, send me some to check out. So when I first opened them up, I'm holding this in my hand. And if you keep hearing me flipping in the background, it's because these covers on this, on these notebooks that they sent me, they're a hundred pound cover stock, which is a thick stock. But the way they finished them, it's almost like they're coated. It's almost like vinyl-y. Like, I like it. Like, this is a strong and durable notebook. And I can't stop futzing with it. It's just like kind of a cool feeling. So the aesthetic is what you'd expect, I guess. Like, I don't know how to put it. It's pretty normal. Like, it's just straight up, straightforward. Their branding is North of Rosemont. Like, that's the location in Montreal. It's right there. You know, the entire front of the notebook is North of Rosemont notebook, 48 pages, Montreal. Like, I'm down with that. Like, I'm good with that. But I was really impressed with the covers. And then you open them up. And they did one thing that most small pocket notebook manufacturers don't do is they have endpapers. And if you recall back to the Field Notes Endpapers Edition, Myke, do you know what I'm talking about? No. I mean, they basically have a single page. Oh, the color one? Of non-writing paper that's your front and back page of the notebook. So it, like, surrounds the paper. So the Field Notes had an endpapers edition. They had green and blue ones. And they did, like, a bunch of painting and swirling on those pages.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, they did, like, the wild colors in those. That was one of my least favorite editions of all time.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. See, and I really enjoyed that edition.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.