Moleskine is expensive for what it is: high price, name with reputation, medium-quality paper and binding. If you're happy with the quality, you can get the same for less money by going with whatever store-brand equivalent you can find, in my opinion.
Where I live, Moleskines are indeed ridiculously expensive, but every other available option has tissue-thin paper and heavy black lines which obscure whatever I'm writing/doodling.
Bar one: Whitelines, which have very light grey pages with white lines. But they're spiral wire bound, and I prefer saddle stiched.
All of the non-Moleskines have square corners which are a design antifeature.
The biggest thing going for Moleskine (which is what I used when I kept paper notebooks) is availability and consistency. They are widely available and you always know what you’re going to get. It may not be the next, but was certainly more than adequate for my needs. And then I didn’t need to tryout half a dozen other options.
I’m now trying out the Remarkable tablet, which has a lot of the advantages of paper, but it’s not quite there yet. It has the paper feel for writing, and isn’t half bad when it comes to “ink quality”.
But where I think all electronic notebooks fail is data locality. Meaning, when I’m searching for a note, in a physical notebook, I know it’s roughly halfway in, on the left page, etc. As I thumb through the pages, I can tell where I am in time. That experience just isn’t quite there in the electronic versions yet.
