But did you ever see these guys?
Personally i like the idea of not worrying about that and id rather just pay up front for the mod notebook and then mail it off when i'm ready but i could see how some people would prefer the papersync way.
We both carry notebooks around to jot down ideas in pen & ink.
After doing this for some odd years, the downside is that they take up physical space, and we have no digital backup.
We were frustrated that the best solution out there was to spend a few hours scanning them ourselves - we couldn’t find any service that would save time & do this for us.
In typical HN style, we built a fast, hi-res, scanning setup that uses DSLR’s and some other neat hardware & software. We built a simple website in 3 days to offer this as a service to all the beautiful people of the world.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this service and how well we are presenting it on our site. What could we be doing better?
No, you don't do this. But please let me know once people from outside the US can use this, interested in trying it out.
"[...] A million-dollar idea? Maybe the first sentence of the next NYTimes bestseller.[...]"
What is your guarantee on keeping these secrets a secret? Why should we ship off our ideas and thoughts off to some company to scan them when we could do it ourselves on our own scanner?
A typical flatbed scanner takes about 30 seconds per page. So for a 200 page notebook, you're looking at an hour and 40 minutes that we're saving.
We've figured out a lot of optimizations to make this go way faster, but the point is that we're saving the average person an hour+ of time, and we're making sure the job gets done right :)
Thanks for the feedback! We are using a setup similar to http://www.diybookscanner.org/ for this and the scan quality is very high. The sample PDF was scaled down and compressed to reduce file size. I'll put up a high-res version in a bit.
For the actual service, you can download each individual high-res page scans.
I would pay two dollars a page for this. Negotiable.
Can you let me know the DPI on the scan? I will ship you 10 notebooks tomorrow if the DPI is good enough.
Hey! Good question.
DPI which stands for Dots Per Inch only matters when you actually print the image. You can take the scan and print it small at high DPI or large at low DPI.
Let's assume you have an 8x10" notebook.
The images we take of your notebook will be approximately 2400x3000. So if we scan an 8x10 notebook, and you wanted to take our scan and print it out at its original size, the resolution would be 2400/8 = 3000/10 = 300 DPI. Allowing for some fudge factor, we say the range is 250-300.
Make sense?
One of our goals here was to launch something beautiful, as quickly as possible. So it was a no brainer to pay < $100 for beautiful line drawings that are prettier (and several hours' less effort) than what we could have done ourselves.
Once we had the basic visual style established with stock drawings, I riffed to make some custom illustrations in the same style, including the logo and the instructions on the order page.
I use 9x5 moleskine, grid ruled, same as your existing sample. But could you please just post a couple pages with different writing utensils? Colored inks (orange, light green, etc) and common leads (0.5 mm HB lead of course, and 0.3 mm B and HB leads). If you need a sample page, I can make one up.
