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End of an Era Now Yellow Pages is Printed Aboard

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 06:00 CST

By Simon Atkinson

Just four years after Alexander Graham Bell lodged a patent on the telephone, the first telephone directory was printed.

It was 1880 and the flimsy pamphlet, covering three London exchanges, listed the contact numbers for 250 telephone subscribers.

By the time the second edition came out three months later, there were four more exchanges in the capital, 16 in the provinces and a whopping 100 more customers listed.

It was also the year when the British Perforated Paper Company invented a form of toilet paper. 1880: the year of paper products that have stood the test of time.

Today around 22 million BT phone books are printed each year, using 30,000 tonnes of paper. Its 171 editions cover all of the UK except Hull, Isle of Man and Channel Islands which have their own telephone services.

Until this year the directory has been printed in the UK - something that is set to change from March with the announcement that the contract has gone to a Spanish firm.

The Phone Book's sister publication for over 30 years was the Yellow Pages - founded in 1966 by the General Post Office (which ran the phone network until 1981) and rolled out across the UK in 1973. It listed business phone numbers and carried adverts for local companies.

In became the focus of well-loved television campaigns, most famously the 1983 commercial featuring an elderly gent called JR Hartley who was trying to track down a book he had written on fly- fishing.

The two directories ran side by side until British Telecom sold off the the Yellow Pages to Yell Ltd for pounds 2.14 billion as it struggled against rising debt.

To try and claw back some of the advertising revenue it had lost through the sale, The Phone Book launched a "3-in- 1" format that now includes a classified directory of paidfor- advertisements as well as the traditional residential and business A-Z listings.

The first new format book was delivered in York in January 2003.

Megan Smith of Performance House, a company which monitors directory enquiry usage, said that there had been a fall-off in the number of people using dial-up directory enquiries since deregulation of the system in late 2002.

However she said that customers turning their backs on the services were using the internet to track down numbers, rather than the phone book.

Despite the deregulation of directory enquiries services and wider internet access, a BT spokesman said the Phone Book was "certainly not experiencing any slowdown in use" - helped by the launch of the online version of The Phone Book last year.

A TNS poll in July 2005 found that 82 per cent of UK adults were likely to use The Phone Book as their main source of telephone numbers.

The use of the internet to find phone numbers grew by 56 per cent at the start of 2005 according to Millward Brown COS M onitor.

Source: Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK)

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