Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
Phone lines work in a power outage. your caps suggest you don't know this.
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).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
As a person that lives in hurricane country, I can tell you that during a major disaster cell service is one of the first things to go. Landline service will often be up and running when nothing else works, electricity out for 100 miles in every direction for days and the land lines still work.
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.
When I needed a water pump for my washer, I went to the book to get a listing of part suppliers in my area. The internet is great for finding parts, shitty for finding parts in stock, in my area, at a shop open today. The yellow pages are a great resource. But this FA was about the white pages. The residential listings. This is not about the yellow book of advertisers. That one probably pays for itself.
As long as they are selling ads, they don't care if you use it.
The correct phrase to help banish phone books is "I found your business online".
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?
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.
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
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?
Come with me if you want that listing.
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.
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.
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Now how are kids supposed to reach the table without phone books to sit on?
Those 800 page long-obsolete tech books you keep on your shelf but can't bear to part with. Taking just a quick glance at my own shelf indicates that the SCO Unix System V SVR3 reference manual would substitute quite nicely for a medium-sized metro area. phone book.
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."