The Rocketbook: useful or a waste of money?

There are now many alternatives to paper notebooks, one of which is the Rocketbook. How well does it work and what are my opinions of it?

In recent years, as the world becomes more eco-conscious many companies have tried to help us move into a world with less paper and more technology. One of these companies is Rocketbook.

The Rocketbooks are reusable and paper-free notebooks that can be scanned almost instantly to pretty much any place you’d like. If this is starting to sound like a sales pitch, I apologize but I have two Rocketbook Cores, one in each size and a Rocketbook Mini and I’ve been using them for three years and I expect to be using them for a while more, so I think I have a pretty good idea about the pros and the cons for this product. 

My first Rocketbook I got for free as it was something my dad got at a conference and essentially I stole it from him. It proved to be very useful. At the time, I was taking three college courses, a high school class, working, and swimming. Suffice it to say I didn’t have a lot of time or energy.

I needed something that would be light, reusable so that I didn’t have to carry four thousand notebooks around with me, and easy to save the notes from. Rocketbook turned out to be just the thing.

I can scan all of my notes on my phone, using their app, quickly and distribute them wherever I want, email, Dropbox, Google Drive, the choices are endless. And to clear the notebook you just wipe it off with water and dry it. 

The Rocketbook has many sizes, orientations, and options for the “pages” in the notebook. It has notebooks with grids in them, ones with calendars and ones with just plain lined pages. If you buy one, it comes with a few pens and a cleaning cloth which is very useful if it is the bigger sized cleaning cloth but the small one that comes with the Mini is too tiny.

However, the Rocketbook isn’t without its drawbacks. You have to use a special pen so that the ink is erasable and washable but I find that the pen runs out of ink too fast, faster than a normal pen for sure. While the pens aren’t expensive, the cost does add up.

Secondly, the notebook can have ink that stains the pages. It doesn’t happen very often but if I put a lot of ink on one spot and try to erase it then it will leave a slight yellowish imprint of what I’ve written. It will also stain if you leave the writing on for too long. If you haven’t cleaned the Rocketbook for about a month, there is a chance that it will stain. 

I encourage you to check them out as in my opinion, the good outweighs the bad. Paperless is the next big thing so, get ahead of the curve and buy a Rocketbook.