Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book? 360
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.'"
Re:I'm torn (Score:1, Informative)
Landline? You do not need POWER to use a landline phone if you have a regular (not a cordless) phone.
Re:I'm torn (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm torn (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Good riddance (Score:1, Informative)
Every tree that was cut down and processed into paper for the phone book was grown specifically for that purpose.
If the demand for paper goes down, then the amount of trees farmed will go down meaning the net change due to printing in the long-term tree population will be ZERO.
Re:Now get rid of the Yellow Pages (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not everyone is 20 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Simple option? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Simple option? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/ [yellowpagesoptout.com]
This site will search, based on your zip code, for all opt-out options available in your area.
This site made the rounds last month on a number of blogs....
Re:Simple option? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's me looking up the pizza place: grab one of the multitude of computers in the house, wait two seconds while it wakes from sleep. Cmd-Tab to browser, Cmd-T for a new tab, type "$PIZZA_PLACE redmond" in the search box, click (what is typically) the first link if the phone number isn't already displayed in the link preview. Oh, who am I kidding? I have their website bookmarked and ordered it online.
To each their own, and your task flow is obviously different than mine (what is this "boot" you speak of?), but there's no way the pizza would get here any quicker if I used a phone book.
no more a telephone than a wagon is a sleigh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Simple option? (Score:5, Informative)
"how I was going to look up the number without Internet access"
It's printed on the bill they send you every month.