Phone Books

Hey Andy "effing" Rooney:

My guess is that the cost of said phone books may be cleverly diguised in your bill.

I recently discovered that I was stupidly paying Comcast $3 a month for a TV guide that I never asked for, for a year, because I didn't go online and tell them that their onscreen TV guide was plenty.

Next Andy Rooney topic: When did cell phone and cable companies first start using herion dealer pricing models?

Or did you do that one already?

GMAN

mine go straight to recycling. they're a total waste. i'd be perfectly happy to receive one set every two years instead of the three different sets we receive every year, now.

we keep one around "just in case'. last time we used it was to get the number of a local take-out place of which we didn't have a menu. but now we have their menu, and i could've just as easily driver there and waited.

They keep doing it for the same reason most companies keep doing something: it's profitable. The San Fransisco Gate had a good article on this (link below): phone books bring in about $17 billion a year in advertising revenue. Think about it: the "yellow pages" is iconic, the phone companies have all sorts of charts showing the benefits, and what store is going to turn down advertising in them, even if it costs them some money?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/08/financial/f0...

Ammon Shea is the author of “Reading the O.E.D.: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.” He is currently writing a book about telephone books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=2

Paul Collins looked into this for Slate last spring. The gist: there's not much hope of them going away soon.

It's actually _required by law_ to provide physical phonebooks in many states to every landline customers. There's initiatives to try and stop this, such as http://www.banthephonebook.org/

I personally never use them, but I used to work for WhitePages.com, so I'm well aware of the online directory assistance space.

They fit perfectly in my telephone table on the bottom shelf below the rotary phone.

Sometimes you need a phone book. Sometimes you need a rotary phone.

I use the phone book a lot. And I don't understand why many folks prefer their computer. After all, UNLESS your computer is already booted and running, it is almost always faster to find something in the printed book. And even when my computer is already up, well, broadband isn't always as fast as advertised. It is STILL faster, sometimes, to use the book.

But the biggest reason I have for using the phone book is that frequently you can find things there you can't online. For some reason, the online yellow page listings just don't work as well for me as the printed pages in the Dex Phone Book (Dex being the "authorized" book issued by Qwest here in the Pacific Northwest).

Having said that, I marvel that even one phone book survives. We get the Dex book, and also Verizon, Yellow Book, and a couple of others to boot. Virtually all except the Dex go straight into recycling. I am astounded that there is enough advertising around to support even the one, much less several.

And that brings me to a bit of irony: although I personally like using the phone book, my partner and I do NOT advertise our business (tax prep) in the yellow pages. To do so would impose a terrific cost on us that we can ill-afford. We always marvel at how much Dex and the others want to charge for even a tiny ad in the yellow pages.

Some advertisers use specific phone numbers that ONLY appear in the yellow pages, so they can more accurately gauge effectiveness. When we've been privy to those figures, we've clearly seen that they did not get enough inquiries to possibly pay for the ads. Consequently, when we get new business clients who are in distress, we frequently recommend that they drop or significantly cut back on their yellow page ads (and then, if they haven't already, have a simple website built). In every case where a client took our advice, they reported later that the drop-off in business was less than the savings on the ads (and the effectiveness of their webpages using more than made up the difference). We don't think this is universally true, but it IS true for many small businesses.

Our hospital library has started to receive frequent calls for the public library about a mile and a half away down a major artery street. Usually to use the public computers. [We offer them the use of ours if more convenient.]

When we ask how the person called us, it always turns out they called or googled 411. The public library's address is listed under the crossing street [there is also a short service road confusing things]. The hospital library has the only address on the major highway.

If the paper copy was used, the cross indexing to either "Public Libraries" or the White Pages public library system listing would have given the correct answer.

People have become lazy and expect single word or "natural language" phrase searching to lead them to an answer every time. Well, it does not happen beyond the most simple minded questions. Remember - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."

I own a small business, and I've decided not to advertise in any of the various Yellow Pages for my area any more. For one thing, at $400 A MONTH for just a small color ad (about 1.5 inches in a single column) I think it's ridiculously expensive. Second, there are two competing yellow page directories, plus scores of other smaller yellow page directories, plus all sorts of neighborhood listing books. My business just can't support the fees for all of these listings. The proliferation of all these directories, plus their cost, is making them obsolete from a business owner's perspective. Third, most everybody in my area is online, and we're doing all sorts of online advertising instead (google adwords, etc.). Fourth, I only expect to draw people from my immediate area (it's a fitness center, and people are not going to travel very far to come here), which means my advertising dollars are better spent on ads in local newspapers. Yeah, I've given this some thought...