Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book?

Hugh Pickens writes "The first phone directory was issued in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and for decades regulators across the US have required phone companies to distribute directories in paper form. But now the Washington Post reports that Verizon, the largest provider of landline phones in the Washington DC region, is asking state regulators for permission to stop delivering the residential white pages in Virginia and Maryland. About a dozen other states are also doing away with printed phone books as surveys show that the number of households relying on residential white pages dropped from 25 percent in 2005 to 11 percent in 2008. The directories will be available online, printed or on CD-ROM upon request but the inches-thick white pages, a fixture in American households for more than a century, will no longer land on porches with a thud each year. 'I'm kind of amazed they lasted as long as they have,' says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. 'But there are some people nostalgic about this. Some people like to go to the shelf and look up a number.'"

Comments

Re:I simply throw them away or recycle

[tverbeek]

They might include a "white pages" phone listing, but the point of those books is the "yellow pages": the advertising section. Those aren't going away, and asking to opt out of receiving them is going to be as fruitless as asking to opt out of junk mail. Less, in fact, because instead of being delivered by a single government-authorized agency (the USPS), the people delivering those worthless books to your door are a bunch of underemployed seasonal contractors working for several marketing firms. They aren't going to get any "do not deliver" notice, and wouldn't bother honoring it if they did (since they get paid per pound of wood-pulp delivered).

Bell was NOT the inventor

[Anonymous Coward]

Bell did NOT invented the phone. I have no clue why it repeated over and over again. It was NOT Bell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis

That german inventor invented the telephone 17 years earlier and even coined the word "telephone".
US-centric bias?

Re:Simple option?

[delinear]

It would have to be opt in, otherwise you end up with the situation where I call them, say don't deliver, then move out - the next person is expecting a directory but the adress is marked as do not deliver so they call up to complain. Every year, a week after the directories go out, they'd be inundated with people calling to complain. With opt in, the worst that would happen is you'll get a directory when you didn't want it and throw it in the recycling bin. Seriously, though, I don't understand why they don't just withdraw it completely except as a paid service for people who call and ask for it. A few weeks ago we got one of these (actually it was the yellow pages rather than the white pages) and I put it straight in the bin - usually I go put it in a cupboard for a year but I realised I've been doing that for the best part of ten years and I've never had to resort to it because the internet is so much simpler, and even calling the directory services is easier than digging out a paper version. If there are a handful of holdouts who like a bit dead tree version I'm sure they wouldn't mind calling for it and paying a small sum to cover the cost associated with producing a low-volume edition with reduced/no ads.

Re:Simple option?

[JSC]

I used my phone book just the day before yesterday. Probably the first time I've needed it in 3-4 years. I had to look up the number for Verizon tech support because my DSL connection died.

I actually sat there for 5 minutes trying to figure out how I was going to look up the number without Internet access before I remembered the phone book.

Re:The apocalypse

[Rude Turnip]

Rituals have value as long as they are relevant and beneficial. This particular ritual is a waste of resources.