New Notebook

I have a new notebook! Meet the Roaring Spring Laboratory Notebook 5×5 quad-ruled hardbound paper product. It is displayed to the right of my last two notebooks, the Whitelines A4 wirebound (middle) and the National Brand 5×5 Eye Ease spiral bound (left).

I evaluated the Whitelines, both at the beginning, and in the middle. At the end of it’s life, I’ll say that I like the paper, I think the wirebound is less durable than I’d like, and the A4 size was occasionally a pain. Here’s a picture of the spine after 7 months of use.

It was getting very worn and I don’t think it would have survived another month. I’d use it again, though. I was going to try one of their other products, however I looked around the office and realized I had an old quad-ruled laboratory notebook that I bought in 2002 at Texas A&M when I was at a conference and needed something to write on. It had been barely used, so I pulled it off the shelf and voila, new notebook.

So far, I like it quite a bit. It has changed some of my note taking habits, due to it’s hard cover and stiff spine; I am only taking notes on the right-hand page, rather than both right and left as has been my practice. However, this is allowing me to have annotations on the left hand page, as you can see in the picture. This is already proving useful.

This is not a notebook that can be folded back on itself like the Whitelines wirebound or the National Brand 5×5 can be. However, the footprint of this notebook is smaller (it’s 10 1/8″ x 7 7/8″) so that isn’t a big deal. You can compare the size of this notebook in the image below.

I think I’ll be happy with this one. I like the hard cover, which should also make it more durable than the previous ones. A drawback I can see is that I’m going to go through it more than twice as fast as the previous ones, but that will give me more of a chance to evaluate other notebook types!