Yesterday was a sad day for a lot of Google Notebook users and there are a lot of them. Google announced that they are stopping development with Google Notebook yesterday.
If you have been using Google Notebook for any length of time, chances are you probably have amassed a whole lot of information that you have gathered meticulously. Atleast, Google Notebook isn’t getting shut down immediately and it is still going to be maintained.
It just means they are stopping active development and there will be no new features or offer it to new users. Also, the Notebook Firefox extension is losing support as well.
How to move your Google Notebooks?
That’s probably the question in your mind. Google suggests trying out a few of their related products as an alternative like
- SearchWiki
- Google Docs
- Tasks in Gmail
- Google Bookmarks
I think the best Google Notebook alternative out there is Evernote. I even called it Google Notebook done better, way better back in April 2008. And Evernote has added tons of new features since then and it still remains my online notebook of choice.
I’ll jot down a few quick features of Evernote here and you can read a full review in the above link 
- Capture anything you want as Notes – Tasks/todos, notes/research, web pages, white pages, pictures of receipts, scribbles on paper, snapshots, business cards, etc.
- Search text from even images as well as your notes
- Your images/notes can have location attached to it and you can search by location
- Has a web clip tool that lets you clip any web page as notes
- You get a desktop version that syncs with your online account
- You can get a iPhone app and that again syncs with your online account
The way Evernote lets you save anything by creating notes, pictures, scan, email, drag n drop, clip, record is just simply amazing.
But, transferring your Google Notebook to Evernote is going to be a manual task. You can opt to save your individual Google Note as a html page and then add it to Evernote.
If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend giving Evernote a whirl to see if you like it.
Amit of Digital Inspiration lists a few more useful choices:
- export notes as Google Documents
- download all your Google Notebooks in one go with a Greasemonkey script as Atom or HTML format
- Use this Firefox extension to send your note to Microsoft OneNote
Along with Google Notebook there are a few more products that are biting the dust in Google. Jaiku, Google Video, Dodgeball, Google Catalogs, Google Mashup Editor are also being shutdown.
If you are a Google Notebook user, what do you think of this development or the lack of it?
Have you checked out UberNote?
Lately we’ve been working hard on having a Google Notebook importer.
Day by day I’m hearing google closing on one of their product. At least we have some alternative that works good.
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Hey K,
I think you have a typo in this post. You wrote “Google” but I think you meant another company?… There is no way that Google could have tried something that didn’t work out. 🙂 They are the “golden company”. 😉
~ Steve, aka the still-wish-I-had-bought-google-when-they-went-public trade show guru
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I just talked with Evernote yesterday and they are creating an import for Google Notebook users to make the transition easier. They are a great company. That’s why we integrated our Project Management system with them! See how it all works together here: http://www.pelotonics.com/evernote_usecases.html
@troymalone
I was planning to start using google notebook when this incident occurred. I too became aware of it. I am managing a tech blog . I am 15 years of age and would love to get your attention.
Thanks K.
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It’ll be interesting to see, as mentioned in a previous comment, how other related companies and their services will respond. Any of them which don’t have a Google Notebook importer will probably be looking to set one up quickly.
I was really disappointed to hear that Google is discontinuing Google Notebook. I use it all the time. I did sign up with EverNote though so I’ll have to see how it works.
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Wow, maybe Evernote can replace all the post-its that are constantly clogging up my desk and monitor and LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi K,
That’s really interesting to Google closing down some of the less successful offerings – the thing is, I’ve always heard a lot about Google Notebook, which makes it surprising to me that it’s been let go.
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Thanks for the heads up K,
I have only been using Google Notebook for a few months but it seemed to work well. I will go over and look at Evernote. Most everything I use comes from recommendations like this post at usually it is really good information.
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Firstable, hi to all, I’m new here.
I was googling about ‘google notebook alternative’ and found this page. I think I’ll go and give Evernote a try.
Anyone knows similar alternatives?
Thanx.
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I subscribed as a premium member to Evernote, but it has a flaw that makes it useless to me: I cannot create categories of notebooks. I can tag notes, but there is no functionality for tagging, grouping, or categorizing notebooks.
There are some more atlernative options for Google Notebook. Have you ever tried scholarz.net? It supports an import of all data from Google Notebook as well…