It’s around here somewhere, I’m pretty sure it is. It may not be for long though. In a rather odd juxtaposition of environmental groups wanting to do away with unsolicited deliveries of mass quantities of various yellow pages phone books versus the publishers of said paper book proliferation claiming constitutional rights to free speech violations, the phone book is gasping for survival. While that looming battle should prove to be interesting and will cause an additional usage of paper resources the question remains, how much longer can the ubiquitous phone book survive?

As a web designer I have long asked my potential clients whether they Google to find things or do they still use a phone book. Nearly all responses are a win for the search engines, even for finding things locally. Most folks really do not know where their phone book is even though they always have their computer or smartphone at hand. Our fingers are doing their walking on the keyboard now.

One problem now is that there is such a diversity and quantity of different yellow pages books published when there used to be only one. When my former business used yellow pages advertising some years ago a second yellow pages publisher came to town. They used the sales pitch that now my business would reduce our yellow pages advertising budget by half. The salesman looked at me funny when I told him that was incorrect, that now we would have to increase our yellow pages budget by 50% to be in two yellow pages books. This was because our customers did not know the difference between the two books and that we would need to be in both books to achieve the same coverage. Now there are so many books that nobody can keep track of them. So, they simply don’t, they toss most of them out.

Ding dong, it’s 2011 and the phone book is nearly dead. At some point in the future something else will replace the technology of bytes and drives and clouds and that will be a moot point too. In the meantime we Google to find out what the restaurant two blocks away has on the menu and what time the grocery store closes. We might even check their phone number or just send a text or a tweet. The phone book is dead. Long live the phone book!

Recommended Resource:

https://www.catalogchoice.org/

Control the catalogs, coupons, credit offers, phone books, fliers, circulars, newsletters, and other unsolicited mail you receive.

A few interesting articles on the subject:

http://blogs.wsj.com/in-charge/2011/06/08/ban-on-yellow-pages-heads-to-court/?mod=google_news_blog

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=90542

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/publishers-tell-court-that-yellow-pages-restriction-opens-door-to-limitless-government-power-over-media-123410158.html

by: Chris Nielsen – SunsetStreetDesign.com