We Need a Name for Our Ungluing Books Service

In 1996, the company I worked for was briefly named "Company B". The day a new name for the company was to be unveiled was really quite exciting. The company that had been AT&T was being split into three pieces. The "A" piece, was to keep the AT&T name and the long-distance phone service. The "C" piece was NCR, which had been acquired a few years before for reasons no one really understood. The "B" piece was going to sell telecommunications equipment and would be centered around our beloved Bell Labs. That's what the "B" stood for.

Nobody was excited by the name "Lucent Technologies" when it was announced. Millions had been spent on a brand consultancy, and more had been spent trying to get Judge Greene to allow the use of "Bell" in the name. And none of us could comprehend that with all that money, they hadn't even bothered to secure the "lucent.com" domain name.


Our management struggled to convince us of the benefits of a meaningless name. They told us the name was an "empty vessel" which meant it would only acquire the meaning that we put into it with our "Bell Labs Innovations". The name had been field tested with focus groups, and nobody hated it. The domain name was acquired.

In late 2005, I needed a name for my company, because I was selling the business along with the name to a non-profit. The company itself was to become an empty shell that would hold money until I had something to do with it. I asked my son for name suggestions and we came up with "Gluejar".

Last year, as Gluejar began serious work on a new business, I back-formed the term "ungluing ebooks" from the company name. I didn't really expect to still be using the term eight months later, but its "empty-vessel" quality has proved to be useful. People have no idea what it means to "unglue" an ebook, so we have the opportunity to fill the word with meaning. The downside, of course, is that we have to explain what it means. "Crowd-funding the relicensing of ebooks with Creative Commons" is a mouthful, and most people don't understand that either!

The language surrounding ebooks can be tricky. "Free" is an immediate turn-off for publishers and authors who want to earn a living from their books; "unlock" suggests breaking DRM, "liberate" suggests that the books were in prison. So we keep on using "unglue".

We've brainstormed a bit about a name for the ungluing-ebooks website we're building. Our working name for the site is "BookPatrons.org". It's a name that  describes with reasonable accuracy the activity that we want to occur on the site, and it has some library flavor to it. From Wikipedia:

Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors.

"BookPatrons" is a bit boring, though. Will ordinary people want to think of themselves as "patrons" of books? Does the "pater" root make it seem a bit male? (Will we get competition from "BookMatrons.org"?)

Maybe we should "stick" to Gluejar or some other "unglue" related name. What do you think? This is your chance to be consulted!




If you think that "ungluing books" or "BookPatrons" are really stupid names, please say so now, in the comments. If you think they work well, tell us that too. You can contact us privately, too, with your great ideas.

It can be fun to come up with really awful names, too. My worst effort: "Biblerty.com".