I just noticed when "Dex" was left in my apartment building entrance
that Dex yellow pages seem to be about the same size - ~2.5 inches
thick - but the white pages continues to get smaller.  My 2009-2010
white pages are a third the size of the same book issued in the fall
of 2007: it's only about an inch thick.  

When I arrived in Seattle back in 1993 the size of the white pages was
about the same size as the yellow pages ([as I said], ~2.5") I'm
guessing this is due to people forgoing their wire line phones and
going wireless.  I haven't had wire line service for 7.5 years.

There are more listings per page then in the past.

--
The only good spammer is a dead one!!  Have you hunted one down today?
(c) 2009 I Kill Spammers, Inc., A Rot in Hell. Co.

Isn't this whole issue just another step in the evolution of telecoms and
the services associated with it?

Paper directories were a solution to the problem that the growth of
*local* phone services reached a point where the manual operators could
not cope, so it became cost-effective to distribute to all customers their
own "self-service" copy of the data.

Now as access to on-line directories becomes ubiquitous, it is becoming
more cost-effective to not have them delivered to everybody, only to those
that actually need (and request) them.

All the ancillary purposes that evolved from printed directories also have
to evolve with the time, along with many other traditional things in this
area that has always been using the newest technologies as they have
arisen.

20 years ago not everybody had a computer, but they had a terminal at home
that connected to a powerful computer network using state of the art
technologies to provide a telephone service. Now some of the computing
power is migrating to the end terminals people themselves have and the
networks are also getting more powerful in coverage and capacity - who
knows what things may be like in a few years time, perhaps these paper
directories will be carried around in each terminal?

--
Regards, David.

David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.

When I moved to my first home in a small city (pop 30,000) we received a
single phone book that only covered that non baby bell territory. I
think at that time it was called Continental Telephone Co. of Upper New
York. You were SOL if you needed to look up a number in a county
location covered by one of 3 other local phone companies. Today we
annually receive about 6 different phone books. Some try to cross
territories, but the data in many is old and inaccurate. The result is
people refuse to retrieve the phone books from where they are dropped by
the delivery people on their driveway or in the gutter, where they rot
and decompose unused.

The other phone companies serving my county in 1982 were
Highland Telco, Warwick Valley, New York Tel, GTE.
After consolidations we are down to 3 companies, Frontier, Verizon, and
Warwick Valley.