bookaneer

The 'bookaneer' bit

I changed^[1] my username to "bookaneer" after reading Krazykiwi's commentary on The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas. 

Apparently (citations below), in the early 1930s, a guy named Edward Bernays believed that book-borrowers were wretches who "raised hell with book sales and deprived authors of earned royalties"  He decided to pull out the propaganda machine and set up a contest to come up with a sufficiently scurrilous term for book-borrowers.

"Like the word 'scofflaw,'^[2] it is hoped that when a word has been added to our vocabulary stigmatizing the person who uses his friends book shelves, the use of such a word will discourage this odious practice by definitely placing it among the social improprieties."

And the entries?

"Book weevil," "borrocle," "bogswogglers," "greader," "libricide," "booklooter," "bookiblitzer", "booknapper", "book poacher", "book bum", and "bookaneer" were among the words submitted. The winning word was "book sneak." But, as Bernays admits in his memoirs, it never really caught on.

I was captivated by the similarities to the rebranding of "digital piracy" in our DRMified world, and I'm an avid library-customer, used-book-buyer, and used-book-lender, so I decided to adopt the moniker.

The 'pagefault' bit

I was a bit stumped when trying to come up with a blog name, so I went with what I know, which are puns and computers.  A pagefault occurs when you try to access virtual memory that doesn't correspond to physical memory. The standard pagefault setup is that you have more virtual memory allocated than RAM, so you write a page out to disk, or just delay loading it, until you actually need it. It's a bit like my brain: I write the reviews to disk because I don't have sufficient RAM.  When I need to refresh my memory, my reactions are right here, in my blog.