BT Telephone Directory - Is there any point?

[Dinglebert]

Yesterday I received through the post the "local" telephone directory. I say local but while it used to cover my town and the two nearest towns it now covers the whole of the Scottish Borders. The directory is now both the yellow and white pages combined. Its now small with 150 pages and for the life of me I don't see the point of it.

White pages. I can't think of the last time I actually phoned a person using their landline number. Just having your number in the book adds layers of scammers who will phone the number. The fact that there are on around 60 pages of numbers for the whole of the Borders shows that next to no-one actually puts their number in anyway. When the directory was double the size and only covering around 10 000 people locally the number of white pages was around 150.

Yellow pages. If I need a local trademan then its word of mouth and people I know. If its a business then thats what an internet search if for.

It just seems a complete waste of time, money and trees to print a book which in my case gets filed under B 1 N immediately.

It exists I suppose because some companies are willing to pay for adverts in the yellow pages section.

[vampiress88]

It’s people preference. Some people like to be in the phone book. Majority don’t. It’s definitely a very small percentage but BT still have to offer it as do other companies.

I agree it is pointless and I don’t see why it’s still here. Times have changed and hopefully this will go too but while ever you still have the older generation who want these phone books then they will get produced.

You can request for a phone book not to be sent to you. I haven’t had one in years and there are a lot of people who don’t get them delivered.

It’s usually the people who are in the phone book that usually get one posted to them I believe.

Most information now can be found on the internet but that’s difficult for the older generation if they don’t have a pc.

It does also increase scam calls too but most numbers have already been published at one time of another so these scam people could just take a phone book from years ago and use it or they use a algorithm that dials numbers.

It would require everyone to be ex-directory to get rid of the phone book for personal numbers.