Yesterday was a beautiful day here in sunny Scottsdale with the temperature in the mid 70’s, so we decided to let a little fresh air into our office. As I pulled our rather heavy front door open, I searched for something I could use to keep it from closing. As a chair is to bulky and the potted plant outside to dirty, my eyes leaped for joy as I sited the two phonebooks sitting in the corner of our office, and quickly went to work. One of the books was too small that the door simply passed over it, and the other book was too large, but not heavy enough to stop the door. After carefully balancing the forces of nature and physics, I managed to prop the door open using both books in a pattern too complicated to explain. I felt bad about ruining these books for 3 or 4 hours of fresh air, but proud of my achievement, I boasted my door rigging skills to our accountant, who simply said, “Well, yah, who uses phone books anymore…”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The phone book, since its initial inception in 1878, has transformed from a 2-sided white sheet of paper mailed by a phone company to a government-mandated service. The fact is we have become so accustomed to the internet now that we’re frustrated when it takes longer then five seconds to find any unit of information we are looking for. There’s a figure out there that says that if a web page won’t load in five seconds, over 90% of users will navigate away from the site and look somewhere else. Imagine cracking open up an encyclopedia, Thomas guide, or phonebook to take 3 minutes to browse hundreds of pages to look for the tidbit of information relevant to your search. By the time you’ve done that, I’ve already found the number and driving directions from my GPS location to the publisher of the encyclopedia you were reading and posted it on Facebook, and two people have already commented on it. I find it astounding that we still get these phonebooks delivered by these companies when they are so clearly outdated, it’s almost nostalgic.

Our internet use as a culture has become so common place that in its relatively short life 74.2% of the population of North America are unique users. This means that almost everyone is using the internet from their own device everyday for various purposes. As far as our phonebook topic is concerned, there are about 6.4 billion searches through search engines a month which means about 213 million searches a day. I believe it’s a safe bet to say that the internet has caught on.

While our current use of this incredible tool is astounding, it’s also growing. With the adaptation of mobile web use, people are accessing information instantly anywhere in the world in ways never before imaginable. It is becoming possible to walk down the isles of your favorite store, scan a bar code with your phone, and get product reviews and price comparisons in as little as five seconds. With this level of complexity and an obviously predictable increase in the adaptation and development of these tools, why are phone companies still shelling out the 17 million dollars a year it takes to print these? Oh well, time to put this on the internet.

Note: None of the research in this post took more then 5 seconds to find. Also note that while researching I felt significantly less prophetic when I stumbled on banthephonebook.org, an on-line petition 31,000 strong that’s sponsored by The White Pages.