Phone books, which traditionally have grown steadily over the years … are beginning to shrink. The reason? More people are using cell phones, primarily or as their only line, and folks don’t tend to want their cell phones listed.
Indeed, attempts to make phone books of cell phone numbers have been met with e-mail chain-letter levels of alarm from consumers, It’s one thing to be able to ignore the phone ringing on the kitchen wall; it’s another thing to have siding salesmen pursuing you via the phone at your hip. People conceive of their mobiles different from a land line.
In Manhattan, the population in recent years has been growing at an annual rate of about 10,000 people, to about 1.6 million residents now. But the 2007 Verizon White Pages was 142 pages smaller than the 2006 edition. At 1,796 pages of listings, it is the smallest residential phone book for Manhattan since Verizon began publishing them in 2001.
The story is the same in other cities. Phone books in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Denver and Phoenix have also been shrinking, even as the populations have grown. And in fast-growing Las Vegas, white page listings grew by a meager 12 pages this year over last.
At the end of last year, 7.2 percent of American households used only a cellphone, up from just 0.7 percent six years earlier, according to TNS Telecom, a research company.
The uintended consequence of this is that people are (ironic, in this era of eroding piracy) dropping out of the most common tools (for decades) of keeping track of folks. Sure, people could always go unlisted, but that was a small part of the population. Historically, if you wanted to find someone from your town or school or whatever, you checked out the White Pages. Now that’s going away.
Interesting.