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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.'"
Create some method for people to opt out?
Or make existing methods more accessible or easier to use?
I know that if there was a simple phone number to call, and all I had to do is call in and say "Hi, I live here, don't bring me a phonebook, thanks" I would do that and be done with it.
Some find it easier to open a book than to get a computer up.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
They're an enormous waste of energy and trees. I can't remember the last time I kept on longer than the walk from the front door to the recycle bin.
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Systems Administrators: We read the manual so you don't have to.
Is there a way I can tell whoever that delivers them to "not bother"? Even then it seems like I get them from MULTIPLE companies not even associated with a phone company anymore. So they deliver them, and I chuck them... about 4-5 times a year. Internet and/or smart phone usually gets all the info I need.
I am very suprised it took this long for them to realize that the phone book is a thing of the past. Only thing I ever think of when I look at a phone book is Terminator when he is killing all the Sarah Connors in order! See? Another reason not to be in the book!
~Bchickens
damn time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
On one hand I never use the thing making it a giant waste of paper.
On the other hand when the power is out it comes in handy as all my numbers are either stored in autodial or a local Google search away both of which don't work with the power off...
crazy dynamite monkey
If they want to cut that cost, they will need to find a highly effective way to ensure that the handful of people who do use them (lots of elderly and poor folks) have a very easy way to get one.
In the meantime, paper books aren't too hard on the environment, and the cost of printing them it nothing against even one month's profit on a landline phone.
In short, the status quo isn't that bad.
What am I supposed to burn in my fireplace? Wood? Bull, you burn wood. This aint' 1876, bitch. I start my phone book fire by rubbing two Blackberry's together and heat the rest of the rooms in my house using monitors to watch my live video stream of the blaze.
In a power outage, my landline phone and phone book still work well. Having the directory on CDROM would do nothing for me. Having it online would not help me out either. Not everyone lives near a cellular tower.
I would be happy to see them go. I was able to intercept the delivery of them this year and it was really hard to give them back to the delivery guy. He didn't want to take them back! I doubt they will ever get discontinued in Alberta. I have been hearing radio ads about advertising in the Yellow Pages.
They go straight into the recycling bin. I've already emailed them and told them I *don't* want them any more. Next step is to email 100 advertisers at random and tell them that they are wasting their money, and all things being equal, I'll shop at the one who doesn't advertise in the Yellow Pages.
If everyone did this, they would die.
That would seem to be obvious as the next steps.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
As an official Old Guy, I find that rituals often have value. The morning trip to the bird feeder gives me a measure of purpose, and opening a phone book to look up a number gives me a bit of awe at the scale of my surroundings, and fixes the number in my mind for a few seconds longer than otherwise might be the case. A hypothetical EMP probably won't damage my black dial phone, and field trips to the central office indicate it might well not be damaged either, so it's nice to think two Old Guys could look each other up regardless of the internet being destroyed and chat for a while before the food runs out and the batteries in the central office run down and wild dogs begin to tear everyone apart.
For some time now this will continue to be generational.
My folks are in their 60s... Recently on one of my visits to my hometown to go see them, they wanted to look up a particular business. I was completely shocked when they looked it up in a phone book. This was something that didn't occur to me at all. While they flipped through the pages I googled it on my phone and had the answer much faster. But they insisted on looking it up in the yellow pages.
Around the same time, I moved into a building which had some older residents. The phone books were delivered regularly. I always recycled them, but I observed others keeping them. I'm now in a place where people the average age is much closer to mine, and I haven't seen a phone book for some time.
So, I predict phone books will stick around until those generations which still depend on them die out.
By the way, this is not license to mock those that still depend on them. When I had that culture shock experience with my folks, part of my reaction was to realize that even if their habits seem antiquated, previous generations still deserve our respect.
Mine goes straight from my porch to the recycling bin. What a waste of resources. Glad they're moving forward.
A few days ago, i received my new residential phonebook. When i looked for the old one, i found it still shrink-wrapped. Same happend with it's predecessor and the one before it.
Since i get them delivered to my home door, i don't care much. But i wouldn't waste any effort to get a new phonebook.
This was all brought about by the fact cell phone numbers were not published in the white pages, the reliability of the system failed when a large percentage of people were not listed.
My grandparents gave me a phone book last weekend because they saw I didn't have one... I stared blankly and said thanks. That phone book now collects dust in the top of my closet. I honestly don't see a need for a phone book. The internet is so convenient and quick that opening a book seems somewhat inefficient in this day and age. They should cut physical phone book production, and focus on making their websites top-notch. Anyone else see it this way?
As long as a free book form is available by delivery as well, I don't see a problem with this. Like some have said, some people (particularly elderly people) either don't know where to go online to find these, or might not even have a computer to put a CD-ROM in. It's of course a lot cheaper to not send books out to everyone as well, not to mention better for the environment (less paper, don't use a lot of gas delivering them). Really kind of a non-issue, as long as they leave the choice of book form available.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are people nostalgic about anything, but this is a very good move. Who knows how much paper and other resources is wasted printing those damn things every year.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
If only 11% report using it, why are they printed? Perhaps a better option is an opt in? Make them available to those who want them, saving paper, printing costs, etc. Heck, most people I know don't even have a land line any more so it is pretty useless to someone like me. I also have a laptop and my FiOS has a battery back up (provided by Verizon) so either a CD-ROM or Internet lookup would work ok for me I suppose.
Hehe, here in the Netherlands there was a TV report recently where people complained that they still received the phone book despite opting out. Then it was reported that in Belgium you don't get one anymore unless you ask for it (opt-in). Seems like a better way to me, cuts out all the waste from people that are too lazy to opt-out.
As ever, my primary concern is user privacy. There are a variety of controls in place that govern the maintenance and use of call logs that the phone company keeps. None of those laws would apply to logs of phone number lookups. I would expect privacy to eventually settle to about the level (and consistency) you see for library checkout history, but without starting a conversation, it'll just end up as one more bit of data the phone company call sell about you (assuming you have the same company for phone and internet).
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Good, it's a waste of paper, and you have the option of requesting it anyway. Now if they could only get rid of flyers and other crap that piles up as well, it just goes straight into the recycling bin anyway, what's the point? It's really depressing how much goes into my mailbox every single day and straight into the bin, where even more energy has to be used to make it back into perfectly usable paper again, which will no doubt end up going right back in the bin! Many of these are printed with high quality ink on a glossy card, it's a shame how much waste is created.
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So now how will I be able to randomly Browse the phone book looking for. People. With hilarious names. I mean, Harry Ball? That's golden.
Monstar L
I use my phone books as fire-starting material for those cold winter nights. I'd miss having those pages around to get the logs going.
Did paper get exceedingly expensive this decade?
Even if not, truck fuel and labor to deliver a phone book have become more expensive.
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?
I find it interesting that the Yellow Pages aren't mentioned, which may as well have an even lower saturation rate. I really enjoyed this post on GOOD yesterday.
Video: Canadians Return Hundreds of Phone Books to Yellow Pages Office
http://www.good.is/post/video-canadians-return-hundreds-of-phone-books-to-yellow-pages-office/
... they weren't charging for directory assistance.
While I can't remember the last time I bothered looking something up in the Book, it seems sketchy to expect folks to subscribe to a different service (internet) in order to fully use this one.
The white pages (residential) are only available upon request starting this year in the following cities: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, the Ottawa-Gatineau area and Quebec City. Before that they were on a 24-month cycle starting in 2005.
If you want to request a phone book, go here: http://delivery.ypg.com/delivery/
As hard as some people here may find it to believe, there are people in this country - perhaps even in your own neighborhood - who don't own computers. Hence all the online and CD-ROM directories in the world won't help them a bit; they need the printed phone book to look up numbers. They don't use the printed phone book because they want "nostalgia", they use it because it's the only resource they have (or want).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But even before I got internet I rarely used the white pages. Many people we knew had their numbers unlisted, and more were in adjacent towns not included in the book we received. Growing up my family always had separate phone number lists sitting next to the phone - one we made ourselves with friends/family and common businesses, and printed directories for all the groups we were in: church, boyscouts, band, etc. I honestly can't remember ever using the whitepages my entire life.
Now that many people have cell phones, and thus aren't included in the white pages, it makes them even more useless. I can understand keeping yellow pages, because you don't have previous relationships with all the businesses you call, but that isn't true for people.
So, how do you call the power company when the electricity goes out? I mean the first time the electricity goes out, I mean (because by the time the electricity goes out for the second time, you will have looked up the number and put it in your cellphone.) Wait, no, you just look it up on your cellphone the first time, because your cellphone can access the internet.
I guess people with cellphones that can't access the internet to look up a number are becoming as rare as people with no cellphone and only a cordless phone on their landline.
--something witty
This is going to stink! For years we've used the phonebooks at work as monitor stands. Most of our monitors do not have height adjustable stands, so when we end up with 2 different sized monitors they don't line up AT ALL. A few phonbooks later and all of our top edges are the same the same along all 4 monitors.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Old phone books make excellent backing for targets in your basement shooting range. Back in my high school days, a friend converted his semi-automatic MAC-10 to fully-automatic with a new lower receiver. Ma Bell would have been proud to see how her phone books stood up sturdily against a hail of .45 caliber slugs.
Google "Uses for old phone books" for more information about this wonderfully useful material.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I haven't touched the white pages in ages. I'm all for getting rid of it. But it's interesting to note that as institutions have found ways to be both "greener" and more monetarily efficient, those cost savings have not come back to the consumer in the form of cheaper products and services.
I have TWO sets of Yellow Pages dropped on my driveway from two different companies, covering the Washington DC metro area.
I also get THREE sets of local directories for my city (Bowie).
And two free local newspapers.
NONE of them have a simple way to opt out, because they make their money from being able to say "we dropped our stuff on N thousand driveways in the area".
I think the only way to get them to stop will be to have them arrested for littering.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
But how will my toddler be able to reach the kitchen table without a nice new phone book to sit on? What will keep my bedroom door from closing when the heater kicks on? what will I use to clean my intaglio plates? What? you mean those are real people's names in there?
I've been using these thousands of pages of free paper as fireplace kindling every year. Just tear out a few pages, twist them up, light them, and you're good to go. It's thin and dry and burns nice and hot - it's hard to find better paper for starting fires.
I haven't actually looked up a number in the yellow pages since, well, since I got the internets. I've got no nostalgia for a useless old inefficient waste of resources.
Now it is going to be much harder for the Terminator to find out where Sarah Connor lives...
Mine go from the porch directly to the recycle bin.
If it takes phone companies as long to eliminate phone books as it takes for Slashdot to get around to the topic of phone book elimination, the phone books should be safe for awhile. (e.g. New York)
Mobile internet?
Which costs an extra $60 per month, and what happens when your laptop's battery runs out?
They're just saying that they won't give you one unless you ask for it.
For now. But the proverbial slippery slope isn't as much of a fallacy as once thought: once a policy changes, the Overton window slides to make the next step more plausible.
I have repeatedly asked for my cell phone number to be listed in the White Pages, but T-Mobile refuses to. FRUSTRATING!
Now how are kids supposed to reach the table without phone books to sit on?
In the 70s in Dallas they had a string of illustrated covers depicting Dallas with a bunch of Easter eggs (humorous drawings, not actual eggs) hidden in the artwork. For a few years I remember looking forward to the new release to find the hidden bits. I was young and easily entertained.
As others have stated - the trees for this are purpose grown for it. Fewer trees used for phone books = fewer trees grown.
Personally, I view it as he's doing his part for carbon sequestriation. ;)
We don't have recycling centers in my area; pretty much the best you get is incinerators designed to deliver heat and/or power. It'd actually waste resources taking them somewhere to be recycled otherwise.
I don't read AC A human right
Some people I know spent an afternoon collecting yellow page books, and returned them to the company HQ
http://www.yellowpagemountain.com/
I've been tossing them out whenever they arrive on my doorstep for years. Big, massive, pains in the ass.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Not listing cell phones anywhere - even online - means there is no way to find the phone number of someone without a landline. As people continue to figure out the relability difference between a cell phone (very, very unreliable) and a landline (very, very reliable) and move to cell-only they drop out of any directory.
So, how do you find the phone number of your child's 3rd grade teacher? In 1960 you used the phone book. In 2010 you don't, period. People are now unreachable unless you have a prior relationship and they expect you to call them.
How do you find the phone number of your neighbor with a spotlight aimed at your window at 2:00 AM? You don't. You can either call the police or walk over there and hope they are receptive. Maybe they have a "shoot first and ask questions later" policy so the phone would be much, much better. The police would probably ignore you as a crank anyway.
When a cell phone was an unimportant adjunct and very, very costly it made sense not to have them in any sort of directory. In 1987 or so you could run up a charge of several dollars for someone by calling them. 23 years later it might not make sense to not have these phone numbers listed.
Our children will no longer be able to smoothly transition from the high chair to a regular chair without the phone book.
And what to use for haircuts?
Phone books make great LCD monitor stands, and platforms for other things. But wait, now instead of getting residential and business phone books from one company, I get business phone books from at least three, so I guess there's no shortage of monitor stands after all. As a bonus, the "eco-friendly size" (hahaha.. wait, they were serious?) is useful as a keyboard/mouse stand.
if you have a phone that works, you have the ability to call people and ask them to find a number for you.
The phone companies charge a substantial amount of money per call for such directory assistance, unlike using a printed phone book.
I think if a phone company wants to stop delivering the White Pages they should be forced to give free 411 calls to people asking for numbers that would be covered by the missing phonebook.
Steve Martin: The Jerk - The New Phone Book's Here! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTDn2A7hcY
But even before I got internet I rarely used the white pages.
There remains a substantial minority of people who have opted-out of the life online.
In the latest report, the Commerce Department found that 23 percent of Americans don't use the Internet at all. An additional 8 percent use the Internet, but not at home. And 5 percent of Americans have only dial-up access at home.
Some of the demographic and regional breakdowns showed even starker differences. While 91.5 percent of American households with more than $75,000 in annual income had broadband Internet access at home, just 35.8 percent of households with less than $25,000 in income did.
Similarly, among households where the head of household has a college degree or higher, 84.5 percent have broadband access. Among households where the head of household doesn't have a high school diploma, just 28.8 percent have broadband access.
Among those who don't have broadband at home, the top reason was lack of interest, cited by 38 percent of those households. Others said they had no need or that broadband was too expensive, while still others said they didn't have a computer or that their computer was inadequate for accessing broadband.
Among urban households, 65.9 percent had broadband Internet access in 2009, up from 10.5 percent in 2001. By contrast, only 51 percent of rural households had broadband access last year, up from 3.8 percent in 2001. The Western region of the country had the highest rate of broadband adoption at 68 percent, while the South was the lowest with 60 percent.
California's relative ranking among states fell from 2001, when it ranked No. 4 with 13 percent of households having broadband at home. Last year, California ranked 14th, with 68 percent of households having broadband access
More Americans have broadband but 'digital divides' remain [Nov. 9]
The free online "white pages" services have usually obtained their data by scanning phone books. Where will they get their data now?
Since Feist vs. Rural Telephone, it's been settled law in the US that the listings in telephone directories are not copyrightable. There's no originality. This created the third-party directory industry. But for online directories, there are EULAs and rate limiting on queries. There's no way to do a bulk download. "Whitepages.com" has these terms: "Among other limitations, you may not: ... compile the Results Data in a database and store such data for any future use ... publish, transit, distribute, or resell any Results Data." AnyWho (run by AT&T) has the terms: "You agree that you will not use the Service or the information obtained through the Service ... for incorporation into a commercial product or service ... to download directory listings or other information by using any type of automated means ...".
So another data source that used to be open is now closed.
This include three from the phone company and a half-dozen from commercial yellow pages. These announces to buglars "I am not home". Doesnt appear to be a way to opt out here.
Mod parent down.
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.
I was forced once to interact with my neighbors in a similar situation (phoneline dead, no cell either). Of course, in this day and age we're spared such unpleasantries by the abundance of wireless signals and the like.
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When I was young you only needed to dial the last four digits in the same exchange (first three digits).
The cell# situation is similar to social networks. Its getting harder to find information about someone unless you are linked to them. And with the new internal facebook mail/messaging it will be harder to communicate too.
From your link: "It is now generally known that while a Reis machine, when clogged and out of order, would transmit a word or two in an imperfect way, it was built on the wrong lines. It was no more a telephone than a wagon is a sleigh, even though it is possible to chain the wheels and make them slide for a foot or two."
Since this story brings the subject up, I can't remember the last time I used the white pages for anything, and I use the Yellow Pages very seldom, using the internet instead. Furthermore I've thought that having them delivered every year has become a waste of paper, doubly so because of the competing phone directory in my area (the "Valley Yellow Pages"). Honestly, the only serious use I've had for phone books? They're the perfect footprint for setting up a PC motherboard onto so that the backplane brackets don't inadvertedly unplug expansion cards from their bus slots. Otherwise? I'd much rather use the internet, or have a searchable CDROM/DVD instead of having to page through a paper book. Another good idea? Phone book available for free download directly onto your eBook reader-of-choice. While I don't like eBook readers for books I want to keep, I think they're a wonderful idea for periodicals, newspapers, textbooks, phonebooks, or any other publication with an implied expiration date on them; it saves paper, printing costs, and physical space in our homes.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No phone book has wasted space in my cupboards in the last 5 years.
They go into the recycle bin as soon as I see them on my driveway.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
I don't even get the white pages any more. The phone company just stopped delivering them about 6 years ago. Or I requested it. Something.
The yellow pages still come, but I just toss it in the recycling bin (probably not even kosher to recycle them although I think I heard something that said they'd changed that; regardless, let the pros sort it out). From the look of it I think it's possible it doesn't get published by the phone company anymore anyway.
And who wants it? It's spam in a 4-kilo format.
I'm sure that with the money they save by not publishing a directory, the telephone services providers will resurrect 411 as a free service. And John Galt will use his perpetual motion machine to force them to -- or something like that.
Actually, it just shutdown 5 days ago.
The last yellow pages to land on our mailbox was in a plastic bag. We made a game out of leaving it there until it fell off the top of the mailbox where it was left. It lasted about nine months until a guest brought it in as a favour.
While I realize the article was more about the white pages, in the era of unlisted cell phone numbers, that's even less useful than the yellow pages. Another old cliché of modern life goes away, with ten others to replace it. Remember during the early era of the Internet's commercial phase (which is to say when it was finally open to anyone willing to pay an ISP), and the "yellow pages" metaphor was adopted to give older and less technically-savvy people a product whose name made the internet seem a little less intimidating?
The "Internet Yellow Pages" phenomenon lasted a few years, with about a dozen companies making them, all of them obsolete before they were even sent to the printer. There's a fantastic used book store in Detroit (John King's Books), and I ran across a small shelf of them sometime last year and enjoyed thumbing through one as a monument to uselessness. This was in the era when Yahoo's search was human-deliberated - each site in its database put into a specific taxonomy by actual human beings - making it effectively the online version of the "Internet Yellow Pages". Yahoo is another cliché that has long outlived its usefulness, perhaps with the exception of Yahoo Finance, which is still handy for a few things.
What will short people sit on now? Catalogs have been gone for years now, leaving the phone book as the only sizable, readily-available booster seat...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
AT&T is required by federal law to produce the White Pages. Its part of their agreement with the FCC for being a telephone service provider. They have to produce them for government entities such as federal ,state, and local organizations. They are not legally bound to have to distribute them to populace unless requested by an individual. Note for anyone interested: your address is stored as GPS coordinates in the listings DB. These coordinates should correspond to the end of the driveway/location of our mail box
May I please have my frontal lobotomy if I bring back the ashtrays?
Why would you ever need a telephone book when you could just use Google, or your phone to text Google? But then again, try telling that to Grandma...
These days with Google and directory assistance (where I can call up and get the number of whoever I am calling) I have no need to use the phone book anymore. What would be usefull though is a much smaller directory containing esential/emergency/usefull numbers like the number you call when the power is out to find out how long its going to be out.
I think getting rid of phone books should have happened years ago. Hardly anyone uses house phones anymore and if someone wants to find a number they can look it up on the internet. I think I've used phone books more to sit on then to look things up. Getting rid of phone books is also going to save a lot of paper. It's going to suck for all the kids who are too short to sit at the table, but it's definitely worth it.
title?
Caution: May contain nuts.
So how will I know when I'm really "someone"?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I think getting rid of phone books should have happened years ago. Hardly anyone uses house phones anymore and if someone wants to find a number they can look it up on the internet. I think I've used phone books more to sit on then to look things up. Getting rid of phone books is also going to save a lot of paper. It's going to suck for all the kids who are too short to sit at the table, but it's definitely worth it.
But I'd want a phone book which at least had the numbers for the local power companies, ISP tech support lines, and maybe computer repair shops (if I was feeling lazy). Or at least a paper copy of number for a free directory service I could use in the meantime if something happened to any of the items I need to chain together to be able to access online directories.
Huh. What we really need, it seems, is a button on landline and cell phones for 'Operator'...