The Rocket Book Experiment

[Jared Rascher]

I bought a lot of office supplies this week. I think it's late onset con drop from QCC.

Anyway, in addition to the dry erase items I picked up to help when I run through cardstock and post its at the rate that I do, I also decided to pick up a Rocket Book.

What's a Rocketbook?

If you have never heard of Rocket Books, they are notebooks that are formatted as sort of matte plastic pages. You can use Flexion erasable pens on the surface of the pages, and can erase the pages with a wet microfiber cloth.

In addition to the above, you can also get an app that scans the page by reading the QR code at the bottom and sends it to a predetermined drive or email address. There are multiple symbols at the bottom of the page, and depending on the symbol you strike through, it will send it to the location designated to that symbol.

Finally, if you hashtag on either side of the phrase at the top of the page, the document will be named whatever is between the hashtags.

My History With Reusable Notebooks

I had attempted in the past to replace my multiple notebook dependency with a wet erase notebook. I attempted to write in the book, take pictures of the pages, and then erase them as needed.

The first problem with this is that the pages were glossy, and it was really easy to smear them, even using wet erase. It was also a colossal mess to clean up. Taking pictures was kind of a pain, because there wasn't a guideline for when I got a "good" picture of the content. I ended up not using it after a while.

The Rocket Book So Far

I've only been using this thing for about a day, but so far, I'm pretty happy with it. I've taken about seven pages of notes for reviews and potential blog posts, and the QR scanning in the corner makes it way faster to take pictures of the pages before I erase them, with a higher degree of reliability that the page will be legible.

The ink still takes about 15 seconds to dry, and it does require a specific erasable pen, at least at this point in time. They aren't super expensive (I got a set with multiple colors for under $10 dollars), but it is a specific requirement at the present.

Once the ink dries, it doesn't seem to smear. While I have read some comments online about the feel of writing on the page, it doesn't feel bad to me. It's a little "floaty" versus writing on regular paper, but overall it's pretty smooth, and it doesn't bother me, but the feel of writing is definitely a personal thing.

I'm right handed, so I can't speak to how intuitive this will be to use if you are left handed. I have read that if you want to minimize the potential issues with smudging pages, opening up to a two page spread to start your note taking is probably for the best.

Road Bumps

The biggest issues I have found are that the hashtag identification for titles works, but you have to be pretty deliberate about your handwritten hashtags. With my normal handwriting, the hashtag identification is hit or miss.

I also noticed that in the lighting at home in my office, I get a weird yellowing on the edge of the scan when I upload images of a page, versus at work, where I have better lighting. It doesn't make the page illegible, it just makes it look like I somehow managed to spell electronic mountain dew inside a PDF along the edges.

Thoughts

I don't want to make a pronouncement after a single day. If this saves me the tons of notebooks I go through when I take notes, it will be worth it in just a couple of months. I honestly really want to get one of these for taking notes at work as well.

I'll try to touch back after I've been using this for a few weeks to see how its holding up.

I'm already kind of wising I had a folio of different character sheets in this format, but that's getting ahead of myself.

[chrismmp]

I used to have one and it was quite wonderful.

[Jared Rascher]

Update--left the book out int the car, and the ink faded. Apparently this isn't uncommon for the Frixion pen ink.

I saw people saying online that putting the notebook in the freezer can restore the ink. I did this, and most of it came back.