Every one of them had some sort of defect. I’ve had the problem with the pocket being inside out like you mentioned, pages there weren’t cut correctly and had to be manually seperated, and one notebook where the pages were glued to the front cover slightly crookedly.

The worst problem was a notebook where one of the threads holding the pages together was slightly off, causing each page to have a small ripped hole when turned for the first time.

I thought that perhaps it was my bad luck and that the Bay area Border’s had gotten a bad batch, but if others are having similar problems then perhaps these notebooks aren’t worth the admittedly low price. Ultimately you do get what you pay for, I guess.