The Yellow Dinosaur

Traveling down the road a few weeks back I noticed the now familiar line of yellow bags lining the road. Later that day I caught 3 random remarks in different places. All were negative. All along the lines of litter, useless, and saving trees hence this article.
You have to ask yourself, in this communication age, an age of Google and cell phones do we really need the yellow page phone books? This only leads to the next logical question, in this time of global warming and green awareness, do they not get it or do they not care? Since all the major publishers are moving hard to build their web programs you can only assume they don’t care. That, and they do not understand market delineation, there are just too many of them for any one to be of value.
For example, at our office we get 8. We are in a small county, less then 200k and we get 8 phone books, 2 from Yellow Book, 2 from Verizon, 3 from Bellsouth and now a new one littering the road, PDC. Guys, how many do we need?
Now don’t get me totally wrong, I still believe we need hard copies of phone lists but as an advertising vehicle, their main reason for being, yellow books have outlived their time.
The environmental damage goes beyond the trees. It includes everything from first cutting, the chemicals used in processing and printing and the staggering amount of petroleum products used in production and transport. Who pays this bill, we do. Who pays the clean up bill for the books rotting along side the road and in landfills, we do.
The phone book as we have known it has become obsolete. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just technical evolution. What is sad is their failure to adapt. Some call it revolution but either way, evolution or revolution there is only one survivor.