Here’s another subscription service offering periodic shipments of notebooks.
Unlike Rad & Hungry and the now-defunct Lost Crates (which I reviewed), there is no element of surprise to this one. They offer Moleskine and Field Notes, you tell them which style of notebook you want and how often you’d like to receive a new one, and they send them to you. There isn’t really any price advantage– if you want a pocket Moleskine every month, it will cost you $13.80 per month, including the shipping. (Since the list price is $12.95, and other online retailers sometimes discount from that, you could probably do better elsewhere.)
This does kind of seem like another example of a business set up to solve a non-existent problem: if you know you are going to need notebooks at regular intervals, is it really that big a deal to just order them online in advance, or whenever you need them? The Out of Pages website also isn’t very clear about their payment terms– I did not actually place an order, but went pretty far in entering my info, with no indication that the price would be anything other than a charge of $13.80 every month if a notebook was shipped every month. But their FAQ has a worrying item referring to paying up front:
“What’s with the up-front payment?
Because many of our packages are front heavy, and ship most of the notebooks toward the beginning, we charge a small amount up-front to cover our own costs in the event that you cancel your subscription after we’ve sent said notebooks.
This also results in much lower per-month costs, so be sure to sign up for a plan with a longer duration!”
Not sure what that’s all about, but I don’t feel the need to actually place an order to test the service. But if you do, you can find out more at Subscribe to your favorite notebooks | Out of Pages.
I miss Lost Crates. :( Looks like Rad and Hungry might be a decent replacement, though.
I agree that Out of Pages does sound like a solution to a nonexistent problem.
I’ve just never understood the subscription services, especially ones where you pay $15 or $20 a month for small samples. I guess getting to try random brands every month would be fun, but most of the sample subscription services are more than I would want to pay to try samples. I would rather just buy new brands on my own in cheaper brands to try new stuff and not be obligated to coughing up $20 a month for this. Or I could just give a friend on their way to the store $20 and ask them to buy me the same makeup/whatever they buy themselves that one time if I really want to be adventurous. Maybe I’m just missing something and those subscription services are more fun than they look. Who knows.
With this one, Moleskines and Field Notes are popular– so maybe they could market to people who want to automatically order the same notebooks every time. It doesn’t sound like much of a niche, but maybe it is.
If there was an element of surprise- maybe one Moleskine then one random unique brand, that seems a little more exciting to me.
Grief. Find the notebook you like. Ask a local merchant for the best price they can give you on a dozen. Or order a dozen online. That can be a stiff investment but you might realize savings of maybe 10-15% or at least one free unit.
I agree about being a non-existent problem. I do not journal every day necessarily, so I am not always going through journals at regular intervals. It can take me 3 months to fill one journal and a year to fill the next, it just depends – especially since my taste is still regularly changing.
I did a year with Rad and Hungry, I think it’s really, really expensive for what you receive unfortunately. Also there were novelty items that seemed clever upon first glance but proved to be less than useful. A case in point, folding scissors that didn’t actually cut when unfolded. There were notebooks I’ll never use because they had weird dot grids or were so thin I can’t imagine what I’d do with it. Then I tried a service called Neatography, I liked the first shipment but it turned into an exercise in frustration when I found out that the 3 month package I had signed up for were not 3 consecutive months! Instead they were going to arrive on a quarterly basis. I notified the person but it proved to be impossible to rectify because of the way PayPal payments had been set up. I ended up only receiving two packets, I’m pretty sure I paid for at least three….I’d advise staying away from that subscription service. I’m through with them all, overall it didn’t work well for me.