Do you still hang onto a good, old-fashioned printed telephone directory?
Asked by
kneesox (
4593
)
June 19th, 2021
I always found them useful, efficient, compact, and entertaining. Nothing online really fills the gap. So I keep a few old editions around. A lot of the information is still good.
The Yellow Pages are great too.
Besides, more and more, I prize things that don’t plug in or require batteries.
Does your local phone company still print phone books? Do you get them, do you use them, do you keep them?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
18 Answers
No, the phone company doesn’t.
Pre-COVID, I would get a privately published one – no white pages, yellow pages only – for my county (or actually the 3-county region where I live). It was thrown onto my driveway about once a year.
I can’t imagine that it is economically viable to publish these any more.
Yeah, they get sent out (though maybe not by a phone company?) and I have a few.
No. Into the recycle as soon as it comes.
Yes. I have a copy of my local phone book from every year I’ve lived here where I am now. I can’t bring myself to throw out the old ones. I’m in it. The phone book here is more like a community phone book, but as thick as any old fashioned one. It has white and yellow pages. The white pages list name, phone number, current address, and hometown. Hometown so you can look up people from your home state. The phone number is whichever one you give them.
Years ago I set up a reunion party and old phone books I had kept helped me find two people.
I do have a telephone book. They get delievered here once in a while for free by our mailboxes, but I never look in them.
No. I don’t have one and our phone company doesn’t send them out anymore.
Nope..
This is the cell phone era…I have all the numbers I need on my contact list. Businesses I don’t normally have dealings with, can be googled up under my local town listing.
I get a printed directory mailed to me every year or two but I never use it.
Yes. Sometimes it takes less time to look up a printed number than to dance around online looking.
I’m not sure I’m getting them any more. It was usually around this time of year. I don’t keep all the old ones but I do have the last one and sometimes use it.
No. I don’t think I’ve seen one delivered to my mailbox in at least ten years. The numbers in them aren’t relevant as I could just google a business and get a number that way. Friends, we have each other’s cell numbers if we want it.
When I was little, a phone book was about three inches thick and about three pounds. I don’t have space for keeping phone books or anything that’s not useful or relevant to my life.
I haven’t seen a phone book in several years. I can remember when I would actually request the phone books from most of this country’s major cities back in the days of the Bell system. And they were free! But just shelving, handling, rotating and disposing of the damned things was an outright nightmare. But dealing with them, and delving constantly through those yellow pages, gave me a perspective on the country that I would otherwise certainly have been unaware.
Yes, and it’s continued use should never be taken for granted.
I still list my business number in the Yellow Pages, and it still works very well for a decent price. And I am the only person in town who does what I do that lists there.
Many advertisers list their businesses on-line, but if you want to get noticed, you have to post your business on a web site billboard, that some individual posts. And every single time a potential customer clicks on a specific business posting, it costs that business owner (so I’ve heard) $10.
No…and I’m always surprised when we get one.
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
