I just noticed when "Dex" was left in my apartment building entrance that Dex yellow pages seem to be about the same size - ~2.5 inches thick - but the white pages continues to get smaller. My 2009-2010 white pages are a third the size of the same book issued in the fall of 2007: it's only about an inch thick.
When I arrived in Seattle back in 1993 the size of the white pages was about the same size as the yellow pages ([as I said], ~2.5") I'm guessing this is due to people forgoing their wire line phones and going wireless. I haven't had wire line service for 7.5 years.
Isn't this whole issue just another step in the evolution of telecoms and the services associated with it?
Paper directories were a solution to the problem that the growth of
*local* phone services reached a point where the manual operators could not cope, so it became cost-effective to distribute to all customers their own "self-service" copy of the data.
Now as access to on-line directories becomes ubiquitous, it is becoming more cost-effective to not have them delivered to everybody, only to those that actually need (and request) them.
All the ancillary purposes that evolved from printed directories also have to evolve with the time, along with many other traditional things in this area that has always been using the newest technologies as they have arisen.
20 years ago not everybody had a computer, but they had a terminal at home that connected to a powerful computer network using state of the art technologies to provide a telephone service. Now some of the computing power is migrating to the end terminals people themselves have and the networks are also getting more powerful in coverage and capacity - who knows what things may be like in a few years time, perhaps these paper directories will be carried around in each terminal?
-- Regards, David.
David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.
When I moved to my first home in a small city (pop 30,000) we received a single phone book that only covered that non baby bell territory. I think at that time it was called Continental Telephone Co. of Upper New York. You were SOL if you needed to look up a number in a county location covered by one of 3 other local phone companies. Today we annually receive about 6 different phone books. Some try to cross territories, but the data in many is old and inaccurate. The result is people refuse to retrieve the phone books from where they are dropped by the delivery people on their driveway or in the gutter, where they rot and decompose unused.
The other phone companies serving my county in 1982 were Highland Telco, Warwick Valley, New York Tel, GTE. After consolidations we are down to 3 companies, Frontier, Verizon, and Warwick Valley.
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