For those who do not use their phone books please recycle. Many non profit organizations collect old phone books for fund raising. Even if you do use them they can be recycled.

Phone books can be used as ballast to help balance a top heavy bookshelf by storing several old phone books on the bottom shelves where one does not normally keep their most used books. Or in the bottom shelf of a new file cabinet to keep it steady until it is full.

On a more useful note, one almost always gets an immediate human response from a retailer or any other entity that has advertised a number to call in the yellow pages.

Try to talk to a human being voice to voice from a website. Its virtually impossible.

How many times has the yellow pages gone blank because of a power outage? Has a phonebook ever crashed or been hacked?

How many local service companies actually advertise on the web just yet? Phone books and yellow pages are invaluable to the millions of people who do not use computers and in particular to the millions of seniors who do not know how to use computers at all. Its actually faster in many instances to look up a type of business in the yellow pages and see them all listed at once and be able to see their entire ads with out opening new windows or waiting for them to load.

If I need to talk to someone I can call and talk to them. If I email them ihave to hope they turn on their computer and if or when they do that they check their e-mail regularly. Then when they do check their e-mail that my message is not lost within the spam and countless FWD.FWD. little jokes everyone just knows we all need to see and never mind that we have all seen them 40 times already.

Are there too many phone books? Probably, just recycle the ones you don't want and use the ones that you do. If they didn't work they wouldn't still be getting printed.

As I was straightening up one of my bookcases this weekend, I was again confronted with whether to discard my venerable yellow and white pages. These days, I am fairly reliant on Google to find my way around local (and national) businesses, but there are a few exceptions -

Prior to Google Map, Map Quest, et. al., telephone books were probably the only convenient source of local maps - very useful, especially when you're traveling. I would hate to see them eliminated from hotels.

I would also like to see improvements in on-line yellow page choices. It seems like there are a wealth of crappy telephone book-type sites out there, many of which I feel as though I might get a virus or some spyware for my troubles. There is always anonymity in your yellow page searches!

I thought about these things as I contemplated the fate of my books. In the end, I chose to keep them around a little while longer. They do make sturdy book ends when stacked.

Those are some valid points for keeping phone books alive, but they most certainly do not need to be kept alive in their current state (several versions delivered to every household whether they are wanted or not). What would be wrong with just leaving them around town for people to pick up if they want one (I'm think the same type set-up as those real estate and car ad directories that are in grocery stores and such)? I think if they took that model they'd find pretty quickly that demand is less than half of what is currently supplied. Of course, then local businesses may be less inclined to buy ad space, so the phone book printers will never just adopt this model on thier own.