But whether or not people are using the Internet (and I hope your were joking when you suggested that all Internet users with high technical proficiency were urban white males. Funny!) to find businesses is almost a tangental part of my criticism.

All I’m suggesting is that the publishers of these bulky directories recognize that their current business practice appears to be extremely wasteful. Large numbers of these books across North America go straight into recycling bins. Even if the publishers are using green materials, the waste of energy seems perverse.

I’m glad you agree that an opt-in program is needed, and I love your suggestions about creating hyper-local versions of print publications. Sounds like we’re just about on the same page, actually.

Your anecdotal story of piles of phonebooks flies in the face of numerous independent and industry-adjacent studies that reveal that the vast majority of North Americans still turn to the Yellow Pages to find businesses. See my post on the subject, which cites numerous research sources:

http://www.ianbell.com/2009/02/23/the-yellow-pages-adapt-or-die/

It’s true that the internet has substantially encroached on this behaviour, but the assimilation is far from complete. Remember that not all of us are educated, urban white males with virtually ubiquitous access to the internet and a high technical proficiency. Not everyone should be forced to make the same choices you do.

We need to develop accessible alternatives which allow neophytes to conveniently find services with minimal environmental impact; we need to advocate “opt-in” policies for print Yellow Pages; and the Yellow Pages companies need to refocus on more hyper-local versions of their print publications.

These are a start.

@Kenc – where did you find those statistics? I am actually quite tempted to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how many people go online to get their information (over 65% according to a recent ComCast survey) and then calculate how many of those actually are looking for a product or service (I’d be willing to guess a solid 50% given that Gallup polls indicate that over 75% of people go online to look for products or services) – that means that, at the very least, 30% of the population don’t EVER need a Yellow Pages. And these are very conservative estimates.

Number one tool used by consumers to find local business? If that’s so, how is it that 8 or 9 out of 10 Yellow Pages books in my residential building and the building of everyone I know are thrown out? How are people using the Yellow Pages to find local business when the directories they had the opportunity to use went straight into the blue boxes?

The statistics do not match reality. That puts the methodology and results of the polling in doubt.

“….But unfortunately, the Yellow Pages business is not yet the death march that the Web 2.0 kids have hoped it would become. … This may say a lot more about the new media of web, telephony, and mobile and their capabilities than it does about the old medium of schlepping giant books door-to-door for punters to thumb through.

For one thing, the Yellow Pages is still the number one tool used by consumers to find local business; the industry continues to forecast growth in the bellwether US marketplace from $10.3 billion in 1996 to a projected $18 billion by 2010 — yes, some of their revenue comes from online, but that number is pegged at between 25% and one-third.

Oh. And people still (gasp!) turn to their Yellow Pages more frequently than anything else for finding products and services that are local to them. According to research released a couple of months ago from Knowledge Networks, nearly half (48%) of consumers report print Yellow Pages as the resource they turn to most often for information on a business or service, and more than three-quarters (77%) use the print Yellow Pages overall….”