Update:I like this paper more as I use it more. It is quite heavy. It does drink in the washes fairly quickly. But one can get it quite wet.I did some 3 color back washes into the sky and like how it turned out. I updated the areas of the hills where it bled and added some shading to conceal that. I also wentuch darker in some areas and added highlights with a white hell pen down between the frozen ice and the melted breakup.You can see the photos progress.I will probably buy this over a Canson XL wire bound book next time. Also, I have some heavy paper that I have cut a bit larger that I stick in the book to act as a blotter, as well as to protect the edges of the pages below as I work for color that bleeds over the edges.Old review:The product was meant to be shrink-wrapped for shipment, however, Amazon felt that it was important to ship it in a HUGE box full of other stuff and then cushion with their famous half an inch worth of Kraft paper that does nothing to add anything from anyting, and the shrink wrap was torn. The corners were dinged up and one of the wires is bent.The ring binding is a little bit large and so the pages shift around a bit. but it did come with a transparent page for the end piece to keep the first sheet from getting a braided against the inside cover.I had a lot of trouble in the painting with the red sofa in the cat in getting my wash very controllable. And I ended up using a lot of layers to get the shading I wanted. I did use a little bit of shimmery paint for part of the sky and you can see this against the cats black tail. That is a Mijello bluish pearls paint. I like the way that adds a little bit of dimension to skies in paintings. This paper did show that off fairly well. There are also some Daniel Smith pigments in this painting that very clearly show glistening mica type particles off very nicely. But ultimately in the painting of the cat I felt that everything was very flat and I ended up adding some more texture with watercolor pencils and then not wetting some of them just to turn up the detailing a little bit. I'm a pretty new painter with watercolors so I'm sure part of that is my learning curve too- your mileage may vary.I did the landscape sketch outdoors on a very windy day down by the channel. I had trouble getting washes because they kept drying before I could get the pigment into the wet paper but I don't think that's the fault of this paper. for this picture my washes were very fast especially the shading in the mountains and I'm pretty happy with how that went and I'm also pretty happy with the effect of watercolor pencils here. I used some caran d'ache neocolor II crayons, cretacolor woodless watercolor pencils for my background sketch and a Daniel Smith and indancrone blue paint stick form a base sketch. The landscape is incomplete. I did have some issues where I tried to do extremely wet wash and they bled over in the area where the green trees and the background mountain sort of blood and washed out and didn't end up maintaining separations or the defining lines I had hoped for. I haven't tried to go back in and lift it out to correct it yet. I also had to use some artist tape to tape the corners down because it was so windy. I didn't have any problem removing the tape or having it lift any of the paper fiber.When I was painting the cat the paper buckled quite a bit and I had to wait for a while so it got completely dry before I could do second layers because areas bled fairly easily on that one as well. however when I close the book and put a weight on it overnight after everything was dry the pages flattened out very nicely again.I haven't tried to remove any pages from the book yet but I'm sure that it would be just fine because there are decent micro perforations near the spiral. they look small enough that it may be better to just cut along the line with a good pair of scissors than to risk ripping a finished piece. I kind of like that they're not too easily torn. The paper is a goodly weight and if it had bigger perforations I'd be a little concerned about then working their way loose at the top and bottom edges and then damaging some of the work that I wanted to remain inside the protective cover.I think the stability of this book could be improved by adding a rubber band or something to it and I'll probably do that or tie it shut with a ribbon or something during transport.overall you get a lot of paper on this pad and it seems to be nice paper although I'm not really convinced it's rag. It definitely has a different quality to some of the other papers I've used.I really wanted a hardcover notebook with spirals so I can open it all the way and flip it around so that I could just work with the one service instead of having an open book and I really like how thick and durable the covers are. They're very very sturdy and difficult to bend. I also really liked that they included a piece of vellum on both ends so that the first and last pages won't get ruined against the cover by rubbing into the black cardboard surface.I would buy this again, but I'm not sure yet that it's my go-to watercolor paper in a book form.