If you’re anything like me, your unmanageable luddite tendencies will have, by now, made you the proud owner of probably well over 100 notebooks. Spiral-bound, composition, Moleskine; the type doesn’t really matter, but what DOES matter is your unfettered ability to tote these notebooks around from apartment to apartment, until the day you die probably, in the interest of making easier to jot out a grocery list by hand, should the need strike you (you will literally never do this).
But what if there was a better way — a more sustainable way, even? — to make sure that all of your scribbles were accessible and protected?
On Tuesday, Rocketbook — the maker of a line of reusable notebooks loaded with cloud-syncing technology — announced that it had been acquired by the stationary, lighter and razor retailer BIC in a $US40 ($53) million deal.
Rocketbook’s flagship products include the Core and Fusion notebooks, reusable notebooks, which come with erasable pens and are powered by a proprietary cloud-connected app. The technology behind the notebooks is pretty neat: Although the pages look and feel like paper, they’re actually made from a polyester composite instead of wood. Writing on the notebooks feels like jotting down your thoughts in a regular old notebook, and the fast-drying ink forms a bond with the polyester pages so that it won’t rub off. But the pages can then be wiped completely clean using a damp cloth — meaning it can be reused endlessly and creates zero waste.
By using the Rocketbook app, users can also scan and upload pages to the cloud before they’re wiped, meaning that all of your notes stay permanent, even when your notebook is a blank slate.
Rocketbook notebooks can be purchased on Amazon or the company’s website, and retail for around $US35 ($46).