We all have iPhones and Simplenote accounts now, but there are still times when you need to (or just like to) write down your notes on paper. If you want to have a digital copy of those handwritten notes in addition to your physical copy, you’re in luck, a new line of notebooks from King Jim is here to help. The series is called Shot Note. The idea being, you take a photo (a shot) of your notebook page, and then you save the photo onto your phone. The clever thing about the Shot Note is that each page has four markers in the corners of the page that help the King Jim iPhone app line up the notes perfectly, every time. In addition to that, you can write the note’s number and date at the top of the page and the iPhone app will OCR it and keep it in the metadata. I was under the impression that the app OCR’ed the whole page, but it doesn’t. It only handles the number and date. The rest of the note is saved as just an image. You can keep all your notes in the Shot Note app, email them, or send them directly to Evernote. Seeing as I don’t use Evernote, well, ever, I’ve found the notebook to be less than useful. It’s a good notebook, but the capturing stuff has been all that useful seeing as I live in Simplenote and in plain text/Markdown.

If you want to archive your handwritten notes, or especially if you’re an Evernote user, you might find a lot of value in the Shot Note series. These notebooks might only be available in Japan though, so I don’t know if you’ll even be able to find them in the U.S.

P.S.- The King Jim iPhone app appears to only be available in the Japanese App Store.