I have never been the biggest user of notebooks over the years. As you know I am more of a ring bound organiser user.
That said I have been using small notebooks as Travellers Notebooks in the last few years with mixed results, so this book I thought might hold some clues as to how to make better use of them.
And Ray Blake didn’t disappoint. Ray sent me a free copy of the book to review it and this post is the result.
According to the page on Amazon, the book if it was printed would be 90 pages in length. I did wonder at first what can you write about notebooks that would take 90 pages! How wrong was I.
Ray eases us in with the history of notebooks and buying a pocket notebook, this includes information about sizes and types, things to look out for, paper types etc. All very useful stuff for people who want a comprehensive guide.
The book then continues about how to set up your pocket notebook so you get the best from it.
The next few chapters cover different uses of pocket notebooks and Ray includes plenty of examples and drawings to illustrate the methods and examples shown.
Ray also goes in to the detail about how to index and archive your notes and notebooks. I know he is writing from experience as he explained this process to me in a podcast interview about how he uses his own pocket notebooks.
Whilst it isn’t a long read by any means, I can really recommend the book to anyone who uses a Pocket Notebook or like me has tinkered with them in the past, but never got the full benefits from them.
The book is available on Amazon for the Kindle, although you can get Kindle apps for most devices these days even if you don’t own a Kindle.
Thank you Ray for the chance to review your book, I will be digging out some unused pocket notebooks myself to put in to use soon.
Check out Ray’s blog (My Life All In One Place) for lots of other useful information.
Ray Blake is certainly one of the good guys when it comes to matters Midori and notebook inserts, covers and accessories. And yes, the book is a fascinating and helpful read which may even help the agnostics like my wife to understand a notebook fetish. So why was I wearing a deep scowl a few minutes ago?
I fell out with Amazon big time last year due to a plethora of advertising that I didn’t need or want and constant demands to sign up for this, that and a dozen other ‘offers’. So I cancelled my eight year old account. Wiped it out! Use eBay instead.
But the ONLY way to acquire Ray’s book is from Amazon. And the only way to get it from them is to open an account, a process that must compare with getting a tourist visa to North Korea. Yes, I jumped through their hoops and half an hour later I had Ray’s book, albeit on Kindle.
Now I hate Kindle almost as much as I hate Amazon’s business model. To me a book is ink on paper and not an overpriced box of plastic and electronic gubbins. Half an hour later [Yes. Really!] I was able to read the thing on my PC.
Back to the start. Ray makes and publishes inserts for notebooks. So why the blue, blistering, bonkers, blazes, does he not publish it as an A5 booklet that can be flogged as a pdf download for home printing or as a printed insert for an A5 fauxdori?
Guess we’ll never know. Now that I have acquired it I can cancel my one-hour old Amazon account. Glory Be!
Any on-line store these days will send you offers, I unsubscribe from the emails on all on-line accounts unless they are infrequent or I really want to receive them. Amazon is no different in this respect you can control what you receive from them.
By using Amazon Ray gains access to a much larger audience than he would by just having a PDF which would be difficult to control because within days it would be pirated on lots of file sharing sites.
Signing up to Amazon’s KDP programme involves you agreeing not to do this. If you don’t agree to exclusivity, your book won’t appear in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle lending library programmes and your royalty will halve.
Thank you Steve and Ray.
Steve,it wasn’t their emails that annoyed me as I simply marked them as spam anyway, it was the incessant reminders, when seeking to buy a single book on line, to sign up for prime, instant, kindle or what have you along with ‘recommendations based on your previous purchases’. Some people may well be influenced by these ‘offers’ … so was I …to remove amazon from my life!
Ray, thanks for this as I had no idea about their restrictive terms [but am not surprised] Maybe you would consider self publishing your next book using either Blurb or a local print on demand company then, as long as you give it an ISBN you can sell it to whoever you wish, via whatever medium you choose including Amazon.and your local bookstores.In other words – you retain control that must be a good thing!
Been there and done that, but Amazon’s deal works better for me.