Paper Bits

Reason number 36,643 why I want to buy everyone at BERG a beer:

Tom Armitage describes a series of experiments by Jack Schulze in bound notebooks.

That? The way I just said it? It’s wrong. It’s… look, read the article. It resists compression. It’s about objects as components of services, and “[d]esigning books around needs rather than form-factor.”

One pull quote that doesn’t represent the whole, because you’re going to read the whole thing:

And this, of course, matches the way we work: a small amount of work in progress, ongoing, imperfect; the rest archived off for reference and posterity. There’s still value in that remainder, but it’s not worth carrying around everywhere with you. The notebook remains of relevance in the present; the separated, archived sections become archival content. This reminds me a lot of Hedeigger: the current notebook, in your hands, is Zuhanden, “ready-to-hand”, a practical concern; the archival sections are Vorhanden, “present-at-hand”, reified information.

Brilliant stuff.

Go.

You read.

Despite Moleskine’s understandable support of print, the company has been trying to reach into the digital world. In 2009, it introduced MSK, a program that formats web pages for printout so they can be tucked inside notebooks. It’s not the most elegant system, but it’s a first step toward envisioning a digitally minded Moleskine. The next step is the iPhone app that was initially scheduled to be released last summer. It is now on hold, but the company says it will be a digital correspondent to the paper notebook. A draft press release suggested it would “take geopositioned written or visual notes and share them on social networks.” The layout could be changed to match users’ favorite Moleskines, and notes could be put in MSK formatting and printed out. Users would launch the app by plucking a digital version of the elastic band.   Sebregondi says the company has never seen a sharp division between laptops, cell phones, and paper notebooks. “Fifteen years ago, when we started the Moleskine venture, we strongly bet on the fact that writing and paper could have a future,” she says. “At the end of the 21st century, it seemed that words would disappear and only images would count. And at that time, thanks to digital devices, all of a sudden, words and writing had a new life, different from the one of the past but very strong, through SMS, through emails, through blogging. So we think that there are really new opportunities in this continuum between analog and digital.”