It appears that the white pages – the section of the telephone book that lists residential numbers – may be going the way of the phone booth and rotary dial phone. A growing cadre of consumers and elected officials see the automatic delivery of white pages as unnecessary and wasteful given the availability of free online directories.
White Pages Inc. The country’s largest independent online directory provider, White Pages Inc., has been a leading advocate for limiting these deliveries. The company has gathered more than 20,000 signatures for its “Ban the Phone Book”
campaign, which seeks the creation of “opt-in” programs for white pages phone books so they are delivered only to people who request them. The concept has attracted 5,000 fans on Facebook.
The Web site for the campaign declares that “up to 5 million trees are cut down each year to create the white pages phone book” and adds that “taxpayers are spending $17 million each year to have these books recycled.”
Phone book companies counter that White Pages is merely talking up its own business interests. They emphasize that no trees are harvested to make directories, which they say they are made from a combination of recycled paper and byproducts left over from the lumber milling process, like sawdust.
“We don’t kill trees for our product,” said Michele Meisch, marketing manager for the Valley Yellow Pages, which distributes 7.7 million directories in California. “We’re not this evil entity.”
Liz Powell, a spokesperson for White Pages, concedes the company could stand to gain if people no longer get white pages delivered to their homes – and search for numbers online instead. But she said it’s the environment, rather than the company’s bottom line, that serves as a motivation: “That’s our concern, first and foremost.”
Legislation aimed at limiting the distribution of white pages directories only to people who request them –- or at least providing customers with a way to opt-out –- has already been introduced in several states, including Alaska and New York.
Leland Yee, a California state senator representing San Francisco, has
promised to introduce a bill to the Legislature in January that would prohibit telephone companies from delivering white pages unless customers specifically ask to receive them.
Under California law, all telephone companies are required to deliver free white pages to customers. The regulation -– which is similar to those in other states -– was put into place by the California Public Utilities Commission 14 years ago to minimize calls to directory assistance and promote distribution of yellow page advertising.
Adam Keigwin, Mr. Yee’s chief of staff, says the initiative fits in well with the senator’s overall agenda to limit waste. For the vast majority of people who don’t use printed directories, “it just seems wasteful,” Mr. Keigwin said.
AT&T seems to agree with this sentiment. The company is testing its own white pages opt-in scheme, the Residential White Pages Consumer Choice Program, in about 10 United States cities including Austin, Tex., Cleveland, Oklahoma City and Milwaukee. The cities were chosen based on internal research and surveys that showed customers in those markets were receptive to the idea, said Fletcher Cook, a spokesman at AT&T.
“It’s all about choice,” Mr. Cook said. “We want to act with an environmental conscience but also respect our customers’ preferences.”
Also to the point of customer choice, trade groups representing most phone book publishers in the United States recently created a Web site where users can type in their ZIP code, get a list of local publishers and notify them if they want delivery stopped.
But despite the advent of the digital age, it would seem many customers still prefer to thumb through a phone book the old-fashioned way. In July, when AT&T began its opt-in program in Ohio, the company’s call center was overwhelmed with calls from customers who wanted to place an order for a printed copy.
And some worry that in the rush to leave the old ways behind, certain people may be left out.
“Many Californians still rely on landline phone service to connect with family, friends and community, as well as local businesses, which are less likely to advertise online,” said Mindy Spatt, a spokeswoman for the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group in San Francisco. “So online directories are a poor substitute and not everyone has access to the Internet. We don’t want to see those folks be even more cut off.”
As for the Yellow Pages, their fate is more secure because they are still seen as important for generating business.
“People reference the yellow pages 3.3 billion times a year,” Mr. Cook said. “There’s still a high volume of usage.”
No comments:
Post a Comment