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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."
Why get rid of it completely? It doesn't need to be a "every year or never again" type of thing. Why not say you'll put out one new one every other year for a few years, then one new one every 5 years for a while?
I over heard in the local telecom office here in Pune, India there will be no more printed directory here either. The last one we got is three years old.
BTW the directories in Indian cities were distributed only by the Monopoly telecom BSNL and its Big cities cousin MTNL. With rise of private players in wired as well as the exploded mobile segment in India, the directories were not much of the use anyway. This just puts the death nail in them.
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
At my last rent house local telco's were in competition with each other to have the "defacto" phone book. When stacked together the phone books I got in a 1 year period were 2 ft tall. The phone companies kept trying to 1 up each other. I never actually used one of them - except one of them had a nice local map tucked in the front. I pulled it out, circled where I lived for someone who was going to visit later and handed it over.
Why should I have to pay for trash pickup if they do free trash delivery?
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"Do we now expect everyone's grandma to look up phone numbers on the Internet? " Actually, yes. It goes something like this: Grandma calls her favorite grandson; Grandma: Hey Dick, this is your grandma. Can you look up a number for me? Grandson: Sure, Grandma. What d'ya need? Oh, by the way, I can also bring you my old computer. That way you not only save a tree, but help me recycle my old hardware. Can you see where we're going yet?
I am currently using mine to support my futon, the middle leg snapped, and the support bar is bent so this book sits below to prevent the bar from bending further.
What they're doing now still lets grandma get one every year, she just has to ask for it. They're just not delivering on directly to everyone else's recycling box anymore.
Dang. I'm gonna miss this annual event:
Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 - Johnson, Navin R.! I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.
[the Sniper points to Navin's name in the phone book]
Sniper: Johnson, Navin R... sounds like a typical bastard.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Exactly. Cell phone numbers often aren't listed in phone directories. To make matters worse, many people frequently change cell phone numbers, especially those with pre-paid phones; when the service expires so does the phone number (even if it was "ported", which comes as a nasty surprise for some).
Ron
But directory will be exactly the same, just not in paper form.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Everyone's grandma is knowledgeable enough to be asked when it comes to internet legislation. Want to introduce new sorts of internet censorship? New data retention laws? Do a poll in some home for old people. Result? 90% 'of course we need to regulate the evil internet'.
Ugh. Do you really think like this? Please get out and talk to people, even old people. It'll do you good. They're like us except they've been around longer. Seriously, your post is probably the most disturbing thing I've ever read on Slashdot. If it was a troll then well done but if not then ugh.
Not only that, but increasingly you get crap results on the order of "FIND FIVE STAR HOTELS IN PODUNKVILLE" (population 12) -- the latest form of linkfarm, it seems.
I'd seen so much of this crap that I actually did not believe it when a motel listing came up for a town with a current population of (count them) 7 people... turns out for once it's real.
As to the "store locators" on chains' sites, about half the time they won't even speak to you if you ask for listings outside your immediate zipcode. Just gimme a damn sorted list and I'll find it myself; stop trying to be "helpful" by restricting what I'm show to what YOU think I'll want.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I'm over 50, and the damned phone books haven't been much use for several years anyway. When Ma Bell and AT&T were the only people who published phone books, I could navigate them quickly and easily. Then half a dozen different companies started publishing them, all in slightly different formats. Then, a separate book for the yellow pages became the norm, meaning I had to keep up with yet another phone book. Then, each publisher decided that I really wanted to see a different set of cities listed in my directory, "helpfully" eliminating listings from cities or towns that routinely did business in.
I have relied on online directories for at least 5 years now, because the physical phone book is worthless!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
They're doing a similar kind of thing here in Germany for some years already, you only get a postcard telling you there's a new phonebook and yellowpages available and where to get it. If you want one, you can collect any number you need at the next post office, certain gas stations and in bigger cities at the central railroad station.
A state legislator introduced a bill to require telcos to change "receives a phone book" from "yes" to "must request it". By the time it came up for a vote, some of those who'd previously supported the bill now were against it--even one of the bill's authors. Yellow Pages advertising is big business here in the US. Regional telcos are grabbing at anything they can to "monetize" and the ad revenue in phone books was a cash cow. I get a "real" phone book published by the telco and one that's purely ad driven that I toss into recycling straightaway. Once the Greens start slapping these senators at the ballot box, stuff like the phone book "opt-in" thing is going to have to go from city to city. Palo Alto and some neighboring cities have already banned plastic grocery bags, styrofoam cups, and containers. Telling the local phone company that they have to ask each of their Palo Alto customers if they want a phone book is just another issue. Unfortunately, yelling at a city councilman at a council meeting for caving to a lobbyist is easier than at a state senator at a local town hall meeting. And it gets more press.
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.
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.
5 million trees are used to print the US phone book, the stuff costs a fortune and it has to go the way of the newspapers and dodos.
http://www.banthephonebook.org/
"(Actually true about the lady in the phone and my Gran, I won't even try to explain about her and ATMs)"
Either that or you are gullible and she likes to fuck with you.
I've known quite a few older people. They all play the old card and pretend to forget things or that they don't know how to do things to get other to do them. If they don't like the current conversation they will inject a whole new conversation or pretend they can't hear and people dismiss it as senile old grandma.
12 Disadvantages of an Internet connected PC over a Traditional Phone Book for your Grandma:
1. The phone book doesn't require power.
a. This has other advantages beyond the obvious "save the electricity bill". Nobody in history has ever tripped over the phone book's power cable.
2. The phone book can't crash.
3. It's vanishingly unlikely that the normal, day-to-day use of the phone book will result in some scrote in Russia gaining access to her phone book. And even if it did, the only information in there is publicly available anyway.
4. The phone book doesn't take 2 minutes to start up.
5. The phone book doesn't occasionally - and for no reason that is apparent to your gran - pop up unintelligible messages.
6. It's very familiar technology.
7. It's easy for your gran to tell the difference between an advert and a normal listing in the phone book.
8. Why does gran care that some random stranger knows what numbers she's looking up? Hell, it's quite likely she strongly dislikes the idea.
9. Making the text bigger can be accomplished using this amazing piece of technology called a magnifying glass. It's intuitive, it doesn't require significant training to learn and you don't have to memorise some obscure key combination to make it happen.
10. The phone book doesn't add £15/month to your phone bill. (No idea how much a basic DSL service would cost in the US)
11. If you're not quite sure of the spelling of someone's name but know the first few letters are correct it's fairly easy to find what you're looking for in the phone book. I've yet to see an internet-based telephone directory which allows you to browse based on the first few letters (though I'm happy to be proven wrong).
12. I've never yet seen a telephone book that required a friendly neighbour to perform routine maintenance - nor a phone book which never quite worked properly after it transpired that the friendly neighbour didn't know as much as they claimed.
(To be fair, most of these arguments are probably more applicable to a generation that is rapidly becoming great-grandmothers and dying out, not necessarily in that order).
It costs money to receive a cell call
Only in the USA. Pretty much everywhere else in the world, it costs money to make a call, doesn't to receive it. Mobile phone numbers have their own prefix (rather than a geographic one, which doesn't make sense for a phone that can work anywhere in the world), so you know that it will be billed as a call to a mobile, rather than a call to a landline.
Most mobile phone companies charge the same amount for calls to mobiles as for calls to landlines, and make calls to their own network cheaper than calls to landlines, so it's often less expensive to call a mobile from a mobile than from a landline. In addition, for low-volume users, you can get a mobile with no fixed monthly fee. The amount I spend on calls with my mobile is less than half of the line rental for a landline (which doesn't include any calls).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In New Zealand we use the printed Yellow Pages all the time, because the website sucks so much. First hit for 'cafe' in (my area) was a vineyard that was 42km away.
As an apartment dweller, I've observed a monstrous pile of phone books get delivered to the mail room every year. It's always the same thing - after a few weeks, about 10% of the books are actually taken, and the rest get recycled. I'm very glad to see someone finally realize how ridiculous and wasteful this really is.