BARBAKAM Lab Notebook 100 Carbonless Pages Spiral Bound (Copy Page Perforated) Spiral-bound – November 1, 2010

Let me preface this by saying that I believe a review should encompass not just the product, but the overall experience with the company. In most cases, this is entirely negligible, but not with Barbakam.Oh Barbakam, how you tear my heart so. The product is beautiful and very functional. You get a great spacious notebook perfectly formatted for lab work and chock full of handy dandy resources in the most convenient places. A periodic table serves as a divider to place underneath the carbonless copy. The back of the notebook is packed edge-to-edge with formulas, trivial but useful information, diagrams, and more. The binding is of high quality, and the entire notebook screams of fantastic craftsmanship.My issue comes with shipping this lovely notebook to me. I realize that I'm not supposed to cover this in the review as per Amazon's guidelines, but the potential buyer seriously needs to be aware of this, especially if they're in my position (advanced chemistry student in dire need of a proper lab notebook for classes).I'm not one to ordinarily care for shipping times. I'll take super saver whenever I can get it. 5-8 days for a pair of shoes? No problem, I can hold out. Two weeks for a camera? That's reasonable, I suppose. But this is a mass-produced notebook. They sell these in massive bulks to colleges and universities. So what's the issue with getting a single notebook out in a reasonable time? This is time sensitive stuff, not like a camera or pair of shoes. I needed to have to it before classes began. I placed my order on September 15, expecting a friggin notebook to be shipped relatively quickly. It's flat, compact, light, should fit well into a small box, right? Amazon gave me a delivery estimate of October 2. That's seventeen days... okay. No problem. It'll still arrive close-ish to when I need it. I'm sure I'll be fine for the first few days of class.Fast forward two weeks. It's September 30 and I'm a tad bit worried. I know I had two day shipping on the order (was in Prime trial) but shouldn't I have a notification by now? Maybe they just ship quickly.The next day, October 1. Still no sign of the notebook even leaving the warehouse. Worries increase, but maybe they're just late in notifying me. It'll be here tomorrow.October 2. It'll be here today. I really need to get started on this lab. They've had more than two weeks to get it out to me, no way they could miss that deadline.Well, they did.Day goes by and nothing in the mail. Really afraid that I'm put too much faith in Amazon at this point. I jump to my desk and get to writing this lab in a marble composition notebook from the dollar store. Later that night I get an email from Amazon saying that they missed their shipping estimate (surprise!) and they were deeply sorry. Sure, Amazon, but when's it getting here? My eyes scan the email and lock onto it. "New Delivery Estimate: October 17, 2013."You. Can't. Be. Serious.Not only did they miss their seventeen day delivery date (how?), they want another fifteen days? that's more than a month since I placed my order.Heartbroken and disappointed in Barbakam, I settle back down at my desk to cramp every muscle in my hand on a stupid marble comp notebook.As fate would have it, they managed to get it out before their ludicrous October 17 date and it reached my house on October 7 instead. I guess they learned to set really low standards so anything that could be reasonably expected would look saintly by comparison. Doesn't change the fact that it still took them 22 days to get a single notebook to my house and that they missed their own generous estimate by five days. For shame Barbakam.In summation: it's an amazing notebook, seriously. It's anything and everything I ever could ask for. But if you were even thinking about getting it in a reasonable time, you might as well start walking to the dollar store now. You're not getting this thing any time soon, no. Best to just order and forget about it. Continue working on your little marble composition notebook and let this beautiful thing just arrive at your doorstep one day, like manna from heaven. Let it take you by surprise and arrive whenever Barbakam feels like sending it. Otherwise, you're just subjecting yourself to unnecessary pain and shattered dreams no chem student should have to go through.

You get a great lab notebook here. It has 100 pages, each of them has the main page that you write on plus a carbonless duplicate page. So you can tear out the duplicate and hand that in to your teacher or boss... and keep the original copies intact and bound in the original page order for your own reference. Just remember to fold the periodic table page (which is made of thick card paper) under the duplicate page for the page that you are working on, so that you don't accidentally activate two or three duplicate pages.The front and back cover pages are made of a thick card paper so this book is almost as sturdy as a hardcover book. The covers are also coated so that most spills will not soak into the paper. (Interior pages are not coated.) The periodic table page, which acts as a writing support that you slip behind the duplicate page for your currently active page, is permanently attached to the back cover. The following features can be found on the front and back cover pages:0. periodic table of elements that functions as a writing support for the duplicate pages1. C-13 and H-1 NMR shifts for spectroscopy2. Ice/water vapor pressures at temperatures from -40 to 375 Celsius3. formulas for computing molarity and composition % (concentration) of aqueous and non-aqueous solutions4. formulas for % yield, % recovery, average, standard deviation, relative standard deviation5. average bond energy for the most common single, double, and triple bonds6. common organic functional group structure drawings7. electromagnetic spectrum showing sections for radio, IR, visible, UV, Xray, and Gamma8. metric units and a handful of conversion factors9. a few enthalpy values for water10. a handful of physical constants11. properties of common acids and bases used as reagents (molar mass, density, molarity, normality)12. properties of common solvents (formula, boiling point, melting point, 20-Celsius density)The interior pages are all grid-lined like graph paper, with a few boxes at the top for your name, lab partner, and the experiment name and a line at the bottom for signatures. The first three pages are lined rather than gridded, for use as a table of contents. The only thing that I dislike about this notebook is the fact that the written pages and the duplicate pages are THE SAME COLOR so the only way to easily remember which is the original and which is the duplicate, is that the page numbers of the originals are written in red and for the duplicates they are written in black.Overall, great notebook to use in a chemistry lab or any lab that might involve some chemical problems. Good notebook to use for experimental work in any other subject... just that the formulas and lists are specifically geared towards chemistry rather than generic use or specialized use for another subject (i.e. there are no formulas in there for calculating resistance in a parallel circuit, and there is no table of common calculus integrals, and it does not have a formula for computing a body mass index, and it does not have specialized info for any other subject area).

I used every single page in this lab notebook over the course of 3 semesters of Chemistry lab. TERRIFIC lab notebook. I love the spiraled notebook compared to the bound kind. It is easier to flip and you can lay it flat to write in. This is also a great, great price. I bought the bound kind for $40 in my campus bookstore and this was $10. You wont find a better deal. The carbon copy also works great. I had to turn in the carbon copy after each lab for 1.5 years and never had any problems. Would highly recommend if you need a lab notebook that carbon copies (this is when you write on a page and it makes a copy onto the next page so you can keep a copy and tear out the other copy to turn in to your professor). If you don't need this, don't buy this...just get a regular notebook.This is also a chemistry lab notebook and will have a periodic table (very helpful). I had one for biology before, so look for one of those if you're using this for biology. Only con is that there is a pocket in the front page that can't fit regular-sized copy paper. I had to fold papers in half if I wanted to put anything there. Not a big deal though.