It’s not a new story, but more and more regions are mov­ing away from print­ing and deliv­er­ing a tele­phone book to every­one, every year. In Canada, the list includes
Toronto, Van­cou­ver, Cal­gary, Edmon­ton, Ottawa-Gatineau, Mon­tréal, Que­bec City, and Win­nipeg, all of which will sup­ply a tele­phone book only upon request. In many cases, one can prob­a­bly expect that the edi­tions to only be updated bian­nu­ally, which makes sense when the dis­tri­b­u­tion has sud­denly dropped to 0.1% of what it was previously.

Blame the Inter­net — Navin R. John­son will mourn its loss, but I’m not sure how far that mourn­ing will extend beyond him. Think about it. When was the last time you used your phone book? With each new edi­tion deliv­ered to my door over the past few years, I asked why. Then I stuck it on a high shelf where it would sit for the next 12 months until it got replaced and recy­cled. Unless, of course, my kids needed to press leaves or some­thing. It’s all online in a much easier-to-use for­mat, so the dead-tree ver­sion arrives brand new and still look­ing like some­thing from a bygone era. So much for the white pages.

But what of the Yel­low Pages? I’ve been say­ing for years that Yel­low Pages adver­tis­ing was too expen­sive, and for the most part I think that remains the case. Still, for many years it was sim­ply the price of admis­sion to indi­cate you were a legit­i­mate busi­ness. You needed a busi­ness card and a yel­low pages ad, and that was it — you were legit. Nowa­days, the Yel­low Pages ad is becom­ing increas­ingly irrel­e­vant, while it’s already been the case that for many busi­nesses, a web­site was part of the price of admis­sion instead.

I’m curi­ous to see what the new value propo­si­tion looks like when they’re try­ing to sell an ad. So far, it looks like if you pay for an ad, you can also get these print spe­cial­ists to do some à la carte online mar­ket­ing for you… at a pretty scaled-up rate. I expect the pub­lish­ers will attempt to pro­long the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the Yel­low Pages wher­ever they are pub­lished sep­a­rately in order to keep up rev­enue from adver­tis­ing as long as pos­si­ble, but how will they fare when it’s already abun­dantly clear that the white pages aren’t being uti­lized? This is the nor­mal way things tend to play out when those with a vested inter­est can’t come to grips with the real­ity that it’s over.