Canada's Largest Cities Seeing the End of the Phone Book

innocent_white_lamb writes "Telephone directories are available on the Internet, and many phones even store their own directories. There is less and less demand for a printed phone book, so residential phone books will no longer be printed and delivered in Canada's seven largest cities. Do we now expect everyone's grandma to look up phone numbers on the Internet? Of course, the Yellow Pages, where businesses pay for a listing, will still be delivered."

Comments

Re:Grandma's Future

[thoughtspace]

And Grandma will correctly reply:
"Why do I have to wait 1 minute for this thing to start to get one phone number?"
"Why are you still here hours later setting this up?"
"WTF is all this other stuff"
"How long do I have to wait for the internet thing to be connected to my house?"
"Why couldn't you just solve the problem and look up the number in the first place?"
"F%$k off Dick, I'll just call Aunt June to get the number."

Re:People still use land lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

You meet somebody, know their name but not their number, so you look it up and call them? Seems a little stalker-like to me... I usually ask for the number first.

Uh, to look up the name of a local business you know that you want to call for an inquiry but don't know their number? There's also nothing 'stalker-like' about looking up the number of a person you probably have not met, like for returning their lost property (wallet or whatever) or runaway pets to them or many other scenarios like this. There'd be no way for you to otherwise ask them for their number. How did you deal with these situations without using any kind of white pages, printed or online?

Also landlines will always work in case of power outage (good luck if your cell phone battery dies), are cheaper (cell phone plans in Canada are still ripoffs), and will not have issues routing calls to long distance numbers, which I have had happen to my on my cellphone in the past. It's always good to have both.

Ring Ring... Pick up the clue phone

[SeaFox]

Do we now expect everyone's grandma to look up phone numbers on the Internet?

Of course not, they expect them to call 411 and find out the number for $1.45 per request, rather than look it up in the phone book for free. It's what the pointy-haired phone company execs would call "monetizing informational resources". Yeah, there are free 411 services like Google's but many people don't even realize these services exist.

Re:Misleading summary.

[camperdave]

When you're doing some late night hacking at the office, it's super easy to flip to the pizza section, find the information there with menus, prices, and delivery hours then call up the one you like

Wannabe. True hackers have their pizza place on speed-dial.