Happy 5th Birthday, Notebook.ai!
A little over six years ago I started a little company called Indent Labs to create new kinds of tools for writers. I launched Notebook.ai about a year later and immediately saw a huge response from other worldbuilders who wanted something better than stacks of paper notebooks.
Now five years after launch, Notebook.ai is still going strong! I just released the site’s 1,100th update with more features and improvements (detailed below), but I also have a lot more in the works that I’m excited to release soon (also detailed below!).
But before all that, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s been along for the ride so far: from the earliest beta testers, to those who tried the site once or twice and helpfully let me know why the site didn’t quite fit into their writing process, to those who use it to build fictional worlds every single day. Thank you to everyone who has given the tool a shot, and a very special thank you to all of our Premium members who directly support Notebook.ai’s ongoing development.
We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go from here!
…So, what’s new?
Premium creature pages are free to create all month!
To celebrate the site’s birthday (and to get into the spirit of spooky season!), the premium Creature page will be free for all users during the month of October. Simply turn the page on for your account and start creating new life for your worlds!
And, of course, you don’t have to just be creating spooky creatures! Page collections on the site just got a minor redesign to highlight their contributors, so I want to highlight a few Collections you can submit your newly-created creatures to — or just browse for inspiration!
All notebook pages are private by default, but if you decide to make a creature public and tweet it to me at @IndentLabs, I’ll be retweeting the best ones!
See your paper footprint savings on Notebook.ai
I love notebooks as much as the next writer, but it also makes me happy to know I’m doing something to help offset global deforestation rates.
We’re a small site, but since launch we’ve managed to save the equivalent of 900 trees by providing a digital alternative. Our servers are also hosted by Salesforce, a Net Zero company using 100% renewable energy.
We’ve made a difference together, but you can also now see your individual contribution in the new Eco Report available in your account’s personal Data Vault. This report shows a breakdown of how many physical pages your digital notebook would be on paper, as well as a conversion to number of trees!
Of course, you can also browse the same numbers site-wide at the new Notebook.ai Green Report, too!
Huge improvements to site speed
Today’s release doesn’t just have new features. Under the hood, there’s also a huge engine rework across the entire site that speeds up almost every page load to be twice as fast, although some pages now load up to 50x faster.
As we continue to grow, site speed is a huge priority for me to keep improving, even when it doesn’t feel like a problem. I believe creative tools should always be there as soon as you need them because you’ll never know when inspiration might strike!
What’s coming next?
There’s a lot of work in progress to prepare the site for our annual flock of NaNoWriMo participants (including myself!) that I’m really excited to release soon.
• Progress reports: soon you’ll be able to see your total word count across all of your worldbuilding pages and track how much (and how often) you spend writing about your worlds.
• Folders: folders for documents have been a huge hit; there are a few improvements and new features coming, including the ability to add worldbuilding pages (like characters, locations, etc) to folders also.
• Collections improvements: feedback has been great on our new Collections feature. Some updates you can expect in October are new customization options for the owner, new views to highlight contributors and individual posts, and a nicer design.
• Stream improvements: new features coming to the stream soon include better filters, new ways to find interesting creators, and new ways to get feedback on your shared pages.
One more thing…
In addition to all these new features on Notebook.ai, I’ve also been hard at work on another tool to help writers revise and prepare their written works to get published.
If that sounds like something that would help you, I’ll be looking for beta testers soon and would love to get your feedback.
For an invite, please fill out this form!
What is Indent Labs?
Indent Labs is, at its core, a collection of ambitious open-source natural language processing projects aimed squarely at moonshots in the field of writing. The first word processor showed up in the 60’s and revolutionized writing through technology. Isn’t it time for another shift forward?
