Blimey! I’ve just read a review of the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen in Creative Screenwriting. I would have *killed* for this gadget in my school days, or when I was interviewing people for articles for Southern Voice (and, oh, today that feels like another lifetime…). It looks seriously, seriously gadgety. An excellent toy. Take notes, draw pictures, record, play music, translate–all searchable and downloadable. Or maybe it could even work to take book notes. Currently I do notes on 3×5 index cards, or the back of envelopes, in the margins of magazines, pages torn out of other people’s notebooks, legal pads, beermats, etc., then I pile them all in folders and can never find them again. But imagine if I had them all organised and searchable… It’s like an opium dream.
And you can draw a keyboard and play the fucking keyboard! You can record a phone interview while taking notes! You can draw pictures and upload them, whap! Wow. I really want one of these to play with. Want want want.
Now if it only used wi-fi, and made sandwiches, and cooked dinner…
Nicola Griffith 
…and folded the laundry. Very important feature.Zippy! I’m afraid to look at the price of that thing. My inner…(inner? what am I talking about?!)..ahem…outer geek is drooling.It’s a dynamic double-O seven wee writer’s weapon!My holiday wish list has begun.
About $150 for the 1 gigabyte version and $200 for 2 gig. Where they’ll make their money is replacements smart pads and replacement ink cartridges. At least that’s my guess.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Despite that, I think it might be worth it. You?
If I had $$ to fling about, yes. Right now…I think I’ll wait and see how others enjoy it first. (You, maybe?)
I’d love to.I’m a teacher in Maine, so cash is something I rarely see. This, however…I’m veery tempted.Wonder if we could set up a “pen share”….grin.
The Vocational Counselors in my office buy these all the time for students who cannot take their own notes and have a notetaker use the “magic paper”. They take it home and can have someone download all the info from it into their computer and then use Dragon Naturally Speaking Software to independently do their homework.The agency I work for has a wonderful tech lab in Austin. I love visiting and seeing all the new disability related gadgets…that is where I first saw a version of this “pen” about three years ago.
janine, I was thinking of group share stuff the other day, in relation to ANWAGTHAP. There isn’t going to be a trade edition anytime soon so I was thinking a few of us could club together to buy a lending library edition, mail it off to people in turn. But with the pen, nope, if I got my hands on it I wouldn’t let it go :)linda, isn’t tech cool? And *useful*? It blows me away that so many feminist ‘utopias’ are low-tech. Technology levels, or at least evens out a little, the playing field. I’ve never understood anthipathy to it.
I think your book club idea is a great one, Nicola. I think we should do it.Yeah, the pen would be hard to let go of, wouldn’t it? :)
This is a cool gadget. I almost posted a link to it back when you were talking about the slate thing. If I were a student, I would really want one. But otherwise, it doesn’t seem like something that I would find all that useful. If it would translate the writing to text, then I would be all over it. As it is, it’s really just taking pictures – scanning and recording, right? Then the paper and ink thing is expensive. There is some mention of in the near future being able to print your own paper. If you have a color laser printer, but I don’t know many people who have that.And finally, it doesn’t work on a Mac.Maybe in a future incarnation, I will want this, but not yet. I do have serious problems reading my own notes when I’m writing in a hurry….That keyboard thing is cool.There is another digital pen out there that lets you associate keywords with your notes, and it creates pdf’s out of your notes upon upload, but it doesn’t do all of that other cool stuff. http://www.anoto.com
I take notes in spiral-bound notebooks, something I’ve done for about 25 years now. (Eek, no, closer to 30. I began using the same notebooks I was using to write poems in, after too many years of writing poems and notes on scraps of paper, like Nicola. I only used index cards for bibliographic entries.) Unfortunately, it only occurred to me about ten years ago that it would help to type them up on the computer, so I’ll never get caught up. Nowadays I try to type them up as I go, and take quite a lot of notes directly at the keyboard. I’m a middling-fast touch typist, so it works for me.
promiscuous, I used to be a very fast touch typist but my hands are much less nimble than they used to be so now I’m a slowish one, tuh. And very prone to typos–but that’s just one of my natural quirks, I think :)jennifer, oof, that ‘doesn’t work with a mac’ thing just sorta skipped right by me. Tuh.
Well, they say on their website that they will have the mac thing working soon, so maybe by the time you get your mac, they’ll have that straightened out.