The white pages will be nearly eliminated, thanks to a bill facing the state legislature in 2010. But what will happen to the few Californians who still rely on an outmoded resource?

One of the many interesting little side avenues (or, maybe it’s more like a rabbit hole) that I found myself pursuing while working on this story was the debate over how many Americans still use phone books.

The YPA – the leading trade group for yellow page publishers, says that about 85 percent of Americans still use phone books. In fact, they've commissioned a number of third-party studies that show that Americans continue to use phone books in large numbers.

But the advent of cell phones has made polling much harder to do on any subject,not just phone books. And so there's been some criticism of the polling data that the YPA and other industry groups present. Take this excerpt:
"According to Knowledge Networks, they gather data by polling a sample set of the U.S. population through generating a set of random phone numbers distributed through markets across the country. For the spring research figures, they called 9,008 people, compiled that data, and projected it as statistically representative of the entire U.S. population. The problem I have had with this methodology is that this sort of phone polling misses households which have ditched landlines in favor of only using their cell phones."

Now what about cell phones? I asked a lot of people in the directory business whether they thought we’d have a cell phone book anytime soon. All said no. Why? Because of the way cell phone billing works. As long as incoming calls cost money, you can’t publicize cell phone numbers without consent. And then there are the liability issues. What if you reach someone who happens to be driving?

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Maybe I'm missing something, but I've never found the perfect online resource to quickly and comprehensively connect me with the friends and local businesses I need to find. Phone books may seem on the verge of becoming obsolete, but that doesn't mean we'll ever fully replace them.

Listen to The New Phone Books Are Here! radio report online.

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Reporter's Notes: The Future of Phone Books