Please Don’t Send Me the Phone Book

Friday, 15 January 2010 | by Pat's Picks

I was so excited that day in 1989 when my name first appeared in the phone book. I had moved out of my parents’ house and had my own my own number (482-4997 ... for some reason I still remember it.) But that was 1989. Why is the phone company still delivering so many phone books to my apartment building?

There are dozens of them sitting in the mailroom. They’ve been there for about two weeks. We have 100 apartments in our building, and as far as I can see TWO people have taken a copy of the white pages off the stack. I presume everybody else is like me—either dialing numbers stored in a phone’s memory, looking them up online, or just bypassing the whole phone call thing and sending e-mail.

I suppose the paper copy of the Yellow Pages is a tiny bit more useful. The display advertising can sometimes give you a sense of how prominent or well-established a company is compared to its rivals. (Although, I wouldn’t want to be the one selling those ads and having to explain to buyers that most people who receive phone books will never look at them.)

Due to a pre-Internet law intended to reduce the number of 411 calls, some states require phone companies to get a copy of the white pages to every customer. Nowadays there’s a growing momentum against the phone book.  Alaska and New York are among the states moving toward mandatory opt-in programs for phone book delivery, according to the New York Times.

But for now it seems we’re in a cycle. The phone books are delivered. They’re mostly ignored for a couple of weeks. And then the building super sends them off for recycling.

A company that provides an online phone listing service has been pushing an anti-phonebook initiative. It encourages visitors to sign an online petition.