Sketching, jotting, or doodling in a paper notebook is one of life’s simple joys, but more often than not we end up just tucking those notebooks away and never looking at them again. Mod Notebooks wants to change that, with a setup that digitizes your dead tree designs.
For $US25, Mod will send you a blank, ruled, or dot-gridded notebook in the colour of your choice. It’s a nice one too, thread bound so it opens flat on every page, and the size of an iPad Mini (Mod’s unit of measure).
Once you’ve filled up the notebook, you drop it in the prepaid envelope and ship it off to Mod. There, they will scan and digitize every page as a 600 DPI image that you can view on Mod’s web app or export as a PDF to Evernote, Dropbox, or OneNote, and either recycle or return your book.
This isn’t the first time a company has tried to span the gap between the cloud’s accessibility and paper’s unplugged charm — Evernote and Moleskine teamed up to create a smartphone camera app to scan the pages of a specially-designed notebook . If there’s one benefit to Mod, it’s that it (probably) generates a higher quality scan than you could trying to juggle your phone’s camera in one hand and a notebook in the other. That and ease of use.
And yes, there’s something almost parody-like about the idea of mailing away a paper notebook to have it scanned. Whatever. Shut up. Some of us still love our notebooks and our screens. [Mod Notebooks via Laughing Squid]