Visible shrinkage
This year’s edition of the Feist/Yellow Book was dropped somewhere near my front door last night, and the first thing I noticed upon hoisting the bag was along the lines of “Geez, is this thing getting smaller?”
And apparently it is. The font size is as teensy and unreadable as ever, at least to us Senior Myopics, but no teensier; the page count, however, has truly diminished, from 1393 to 1240. Worse yet, the array of coupons in the back, which used to occupy 120 pages, is now down to 106.
Consolation prize: government listings have dropped from seventeen pages to sixteen.
Flack »
9 January 2009 · 9:31 am
I asked ten people in my office if they would pay $1 for a phone book and all ten of them said no. Ours goes straight from the front porch to the recycle bin every year — and for some reason, we get two or three of them within the span of a couple of weeks.
Surely the demographic of people who can read, own telephones and don’t own computers must be shrinking to the point that printing physical copies of the yellow book no longer make sense, right?
Dan B »
10 January 2009 · 9:43 am
As long as companies keep buying ad space in those phone books, the publishers will keep printing them.