I noticed last year Barnes and Nobel's had a line of notebook / journals called ecosystem, by a company Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of B&N.)  They had several colors, sizes and styles.  I love using small notebooks for sketching and writing down lists or ideas.

Like Moleskine, the ecosystem journals have the plain, ruled, grid, planner variations, with the elastic band and back pocket (at least in the small books.)  I still had a couple of artist moleskines I was working through so I decided to pick up a couple of ecosystem pocket sized gridded journals for random notes on a trip i was taking, and a couple for a friend.  I like the quality of the ecosystem grid journal and it's perforated pages, should one need to remove a page neatly.  Also as well, they offer more pages than the Moleskine equivalent.  This could either be unfavorable or welcomed, as the journal is a fraction of an inch thicker because of it, but on the other hand you have a few more pages.  There is something comfortable about the feel and size of a moleskine hardcover pocket journal that ecosystem doesn't match.  The cover is quite tough on those ecosystem pocket journals though, and they have a slight rubbery or grippy feel to them unlike moleskines, and therefore feel more rugged.  I should really ask the friend I was with in Africa if the ecosystem notebook I gave him is still holding up as that place tends to beat the shit out of all your gear.  What swayed me to try ecosystem out was they were the same price (last year) and had more pages, and are made from completely recycled material, 100% made in the USA with a network of manufacturers.  When I recently checked out both Moleskines and ecosystem this year, Moleskines had dropped by around a dollar to below nine bucks- at least at my local B&N.

I am curious to try ecosystem's artist notebook heavier paper, but I do like the yellow cards in the Moleskine art journal.  I may write ecosystem to see if they will have warm colored card paper for their art journals.

Update:  journals and notebooks 2

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Thanks for sharing!