Telephone directory

The advent of the Internet, search engines, and smartphones in the 21st century greatly reduced the need for a paper phone book.

[1][2] Some communities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, sought to ban their unsolicited distribution as wasteful, unwanted and harmful to the environment.

[1] Subscriber names are generally listed in alphabetical order, together with their postal or street address and telephone number.

In the US, under current rules and practices, mobile phone and voice over IP listings are not included in telephone directories.

Efforts to create cellular directories have met stiff opposition from several fronts, including those who seek to avoid telemarketers.

These were not a matter of a single click: PhoneDisc, depending on the mix of Residential, Business or both, involved up to eight CD-ROMs.

[8][9] The combination of phone number lookups, along with Internet access, was offered by some service providers; VoIP (Voice over IP) was an additional feature.

Books listing the inhabitants of an entire city were widely published starting in the 18th century, before the invention of the telephone.

Parker came to this idea out of fear that Lowell, Massachusetts's four operators would contract measles and be unable to connect telephone subscribers to one another.

The Reuben H. Donnelly company asserts[15] that it published the first classified directory, or yellow pages, for Chicago, Illinois, in 1886.