Hanson Directory came up with the idea of regional books and then did a pretty fair job of lumping the right communities together. Bell got hit hard enough that they also had to consolidate their books.

This is the only time I am aware of that Yellow Pages publishers ever did anything to benefit the consumer. Theirs has always been an industry exclusively dedicated to maximizing revenue from an information monopoly, and they truly have no idea how to survive now that they have serious competition.

They won’t make it online. They are inherently consumer unfriendly and I do not trust them to prioritize my search findings in an acceptable or complete manner. Even if they fix their problems [by copying a successful model], I wouldn’t trust them.

Yellow Pages companies — large and small, incumbent and independent — have spent nearly two decades burning goodwill and trust among their advertisers. Whether they were raising rates in the face of clear usage and/or distribution declines, or simply not being transparent and objective in planning a print Yellow Pages campaign, advertisers — large and small — are reluctant to “trust” Yellow Pages publishers.

I have a hard time trusting Idearc (and their competitors) based on how they treat the public. It sucks to hear that they’ve also been abusing the trust of local businesses, but it’s not that surprising to find out.

This is interesting to see the precipitous fall of all these industries (financial, newspapers, YP) that for years over-inflated their true sales numbers and ROI to the point now where the reckoning occurs. Instead of relying on real numbers, which while flatter would have allowed a gentler fall more easily explained with facts, now they are forced to layer lies upon lies to try to tap dance around the reality that people all around the world no longer turn to the yellow pages (except of course those emergencies like the couch falling on you when your cell phone is dead and only the yellow pages is available because you had used it to replace that couch leg that fell off the last time you moved).

And then they try to profile a person like me as being way above the early adopter curve of new technology…what a joke…I barely touch my cell minutes; and I use computers–not because they are so geeky cool that I can impress my friends by not using YP–I use a computer because it replaces YP, it is more efficient and up-to-date. I don’t run around my computer and worship its power, I use it like a hammer and screwdriver, as a tool for my life. I don’t use YP, rarely did ever and certainly not since about 1999 when I stopped buying a home phone-line too.

I don’t begrudge late-adopters continuing to use YP, but at this point, they are the ones who should OPT-IN for this archaic service.