Fakebook? Really? Is it music in a 'tech' class!?

I've been a jazz bassist for many years and any jazz musician can tell you how important it is to have 'fake books' in their music collection. These books are invaluable to musicians on the whole, but especially to jazz musicians. Fake books include a category of books called real books and are all wonderful collections of sheet music usually written to include an overview of melodies (tunes), lyrics (words) and/or chord movements (music) of numerous songs, typically written on one page. Some really popular books include the: "Ultimate Jazz Fake Book", "Real Jazz Fake Book", "Performer’s Complete Fake Book" "Real Book" (3 volumes) and the "New Real Book" (3 volumes). I've actually found the popular and self proclaimed "World's Greatest Fake Book" being fully shared (.pdf version) online. Other popular books also available online in pdf include: "Jazz Fakebook" and "557 Jazz Standards swing to bop".  These last three examples provide a model of the format for all of the other music fake books.

In addition to this, there's the very powerful "Fake Book Index" that list tons of tunes and the appropriate book where the chord charts (sheet music) can be found. Did you see any song that you know and love in the index? If you did, you now know which fake book to find it in.

But I'm not writing about music today. The Fakebook tool that is associated with Web 2.0 is a completely different animal. Classtools.net describes Fakebook as a tool to create fake profiles for historical/fictional characters. The site further outlines that you can "use 'Fakebook' to chart the plot of a book, the development of a character, a series of historical events, the debates and relationships between people, and so on".  (You can find searchable archives in Fakebook from Classnet.net).

I suppose Fakebook is doing its best to maintain top search results on search engines but because this term has been associated with music for so many years, Fakebook's name as a Web 2.0 tool will face an uphill battle.  To add to the confusion, Fakebook has a Facebook page. Yes that's correct, but Facebook doesn't appear to have a Fakebook account!  I know - I'm also trying hard to keep up with the puzzle.

Now that you've been informed, remember that Fakebook still means something totally different to many folks. For me, it's still mostly about music even though I've been enlightened.  Thought you should know.