Canada's Largest Cities Seeing the End of the Phone Book 206
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."
Re:Misleading summary. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some will instantly start yammering how it is "environmentalists" fault too.
Businesses are cutting delivery of everything that costs them money. Be it bank statements, or phone books. A phone book takes a few dollars to print and deliver. Why deliver phone books when that costs you 5% of your yearly profit from that customer?
Business directory will still be delivered because that's its *revenue model*. Businesses *pay* to be listed in these books. If they are not delivered to customers, then why would businesses pay to be included in them?
Re:Do we now expect everyone's grandma to look... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People still use land lines? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Ring Ring... Pick up the clue phone (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Grandma's Future (Score:3, Insightful)
And stick grandma with the new third world AT&T data plans? I love my grandma you insensitive clod.
Re:Directory Assistance... (Score:3, Insightful)
"(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.
Re:Older people and smudgy printing (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:Misleading summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wannabe. True hackers have their pizza place on speed-dial.
Yellow Pages... the abyss of useless (Score:1, Insightful)
Yellow pages is horrible online... I have a better chance finding companies without websites on google then I do finding anything on the yellow pages website.
Re:Misleading summary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post raised the issue of legitimacy. People have traditionally ascribed more legitimacy to print than to on-line media. The online yellow pages gets a "halo effect" from the print version - it's part of how they sell it to advertisers.
Additionally, your original post fails in another respect - "Yellow Pages" is trademarked - if it's using the term "Yellow Pages", it's under license, so "figuring out which of the 1x10^3 online versions are legit" isn't that much of an issue.