A predecessor to fake books was created in May 1942 when George Goodwin, a radio station director, released the first Tune-Dex cards.
In 1964, the FBI's Cleveland, Ohio, office observed that "practically every professional musician in the country owns at least one of these fake music books as they constitute probably the single most useful document available".
Usually chord symbols, titles, composer names, and lyrics were typewritten, but for a number of songs these were all photocopied along with the melody line.
Since these computer-based fake books are stored on a computer, the user can have the key transposed instantly.
Examples of such transposable charts software are Jazz studies (web based) and Fakebook (Android app).