Ophaya Notebooks and Refills: Which Paper and Ink Fit Your Smart Pen

Your Ophaya smart pen captures handwriting only on Ophaya dot-code paper or the Ophaya LCD writing tablet, so the notebooks and refills you buy decide how long you can keep writing. There are four paper options: A5 spiral notebooks in a 5-pack, a leather-cover notebook you can refill, A5 refill paper for a 6-ring binder, and pocket-size mini notebooks. Ink comes in packs of 10 or 20 refills. For most people who write every day, the A5 5-pack costs the least per page.

This guide is for people who already own an Ophaya pen or are about to buy one. Prices below are list prices on ophaya.com at our October 2, 2026 check, and they change, so check the product page before you order.

Why the paper has to be Ophaya paper

The Ophaya pen has an infrared camera next to the tip that reads a faint printed dot pattern. Each patch of the pattern is different, which tells the pen where on which page it is. On ordinary paper the pen still writes ink like a normal ballpoint, but nothing reaches the Ophaya Pro+ app. Dot paper from other smart pen brands, such as Livescribe, Neo smartpen or Moleskine, uses its own pattern and will not capture with our pen either. We explain the reasons in can you use a smart pen on regular paper.

If you sometimes write pages you won't keep on paper, the 10-inch LCD writing tablet is the other surface the pen works on. You write on it with the same pen, the strokes stream to the app, and you tap to save the page before you press erase. It costs $29.99 on its own and has no cost per page.

Ophaya notebooks and refill paper

A5 Smart Notebook 5-pack

The A5 Smart Notebook 5-pack is $29.99 for five spiral notebooks. Each one is 15 by 21 cm (about 5.9 by 8.3 inches) with 64 sheets, or 128 pages, of 100gsm paper you can write on both sides. The spiral binding lies flat, which helps if you write with the notebook on your knee in a lecture hall.

Leather-cover notebook with pen loop

The Smart Paper Notebook is $29.99 in black, gray or a mix of the two. It has a PU leather cover, a pen loop, four card slots and 120 pages of dot-code paper inside, and you can add refill paper when those run out. Pick it if the notebook goes to client meetings and you want it to look the part.

A5 dot refill paper

The A5 dot refill paper is $19.99 for two packs of 60 sheets each, so 240 pages in total. The sheets are 5.5 by 8 inches, 100gsm, ruled at 8 mm and punched with six holes for a standard A5 6-ring binder. The packs are printed as pages 121 to 360, which follow on from the 120 pages that come in the leather-cover notebook.

Mini notebooks

The mini notebook is 9 by 14 cm with 32 pages, small enough for a jacket pocket. One costs $15.99, two cost $29.99, four cost $55.99 and ten cost $119.99. It is not refillable. It suits short notes on the move, like a site visit or a quick client call, more than a semester of lectures.

What each page costs

Dividing the list price by the number of pages gives a rough cost per page. Covers, binding and pockets are part of what you pay for, so the cheapest page isn't always the right one.

We'll be direct about the mini notebooks: they are the most expensive pages we sell. If you started with the Smart Pen + Mini Notebook set and now fill pages every day, switching to the A5 5-pack brings the cost per page down to about a tenth of a single mini notebook's. Keep a mini notebook for your pocket and do the long writing in A5.

Ink refills

The pen writes with a replaceable black ballpoint refill with a 0.5 mm tip. The refill listing has a 10-piece pack at $9.99 and a 20-piece pack at $17.99, and the same listing sells a 10-piece pack of black nibs for the writing tablet at $9.99. Buy refills made for the Ophaya pen, since the refill has to fit the pen body.

We don't publish a page count per refill, because it depends on how large and how hard you write. The easy rule is to keep two spares in your bag or desk drawer, and reorder when you open the last pack.

How much paper to order

Count the pages you fill in a normal week, then do the math. A student who fills 15 pages a week across classes will use a 128-page A5 notebook in about eight or nine weeks, so the 5-pack covers roughly a school year. Someone who writes 3 or 4 pages each workday fills a notebook in about seven weeks.

Running out matters more with a smart pen than with an ordinary notebook. On plain paper the pen writes but captures nothing, so pages written there won't be in the app. Order the next pack when you start your last notebook, not when you reach its last page. US orders ship within 48 hours, and transit time is extra.

If a lot of what you write is scratch work, like math practice or a brainstorm before a call, put it on the LCD tablet instead and save only the pages worth keeping. That stretches your paper further than any pack size will. Our guide to how LCD writing tablets work explains the tablet in more detail.

Spare parts

Two smaller items are worth knowing about. A replacement pen cap is $5. If you lose the pen itself, the Ophaya Replacement Smart Pen is $54.95 and works with your existing Ophaya notebooks and the Ophaya Pro+ app. It comes as the pen only, without a notebook, tablet, refills or charging cable. If the pen is fine but pages aren't arriving in the app, start with these sync checks before buying anything.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use any notebook with the Ophaya pen?

It writes ink on any paper, but it only captures handwriting on Ophaya dot-code paper or the Ophaya LCD writing tablet. Pages written in other notebooks won't appear in the app.

Do Livescribe or Neo notebooks work with Ophaya?

No. Each brand prints its own dot pattern, and the Ophaya pen reads only Ophaya's. The same goes the other way: an Ophaya notebook won't capture with another brand's pen.

Which Ophaya notebook is the cheapest per page?

The A5 Smart Notebook 5-pack, at about 4.7 cents a page at our October 2, 2026 check. The A5 refill paper comes next at about 8.3 cents.

Is the mini notebook refillable?

No. When it's full you buy another one. The leather-cover notebook is the one designed to take refill paper.

How many pages does the pen hold if I'm away from my phone?

About 1,000 pages. They sync to the Ophaya Pro+ app when you reconnect.