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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.
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
Note that in most European countries, as the mobile phone billing system is reversed (caller pays, not callee, unless roaming in another country) it is quite popular to have mobile phone numbers in the yellow/white pages.
Just looking at the pizza section of my local area, about half the numbers are mobile numbers. Looking at the doctor section, all the doctors that do house calls have a mobile listed. Some people have the same mobile number for longer than their landline. During my teens, I had one mobile phone number, and about 8 different landlines.
This being said, you have to draw a line at some point. Would I look up my neighbour's number at 2AM? No, I'd just pull the curtains after giving him the finger. If I need to urgently call a teacher, why don't I already have the number? When I was a kid, the head teacher would ask for our phone number, at the beginning of every year. I did exactly the same, and wrote it down somewhere.
Plus, the shoot-first argument is only valid in the US. To be fair, I've never had a neighbour who'd stop something I found annoying even if I asked. Having a phone number wouldn't really matter anyway.