The Guardian of London has reported that the Yellow Pages telephone directory, dating to the 1960s in the United Kingdom, soon will no longer be printed.
The Yellow Pages will stop printing from January 2019 after more than five decades, its owner Yell has announced.
Yell has taken the decision to fully digitise the business, ending the publication’s 51-year run. The first of the 104 final editions will be distributed in Kingston in January 2018, and the last will be sent out a year later in Brighton, where it was first published in 1966.
The company will print 23m copies of the final editions, which Yell hopes will become a souvenir.
The same may soon happen in the United States, where the Yellow Pages started in the 1880s and became the most profitable arm of AT&T. With the break-up of Ma Bell in the 1980s and the rise of the internet since the 1990s, businesses and consumers have found many cheaper alternatives to the old monopoly.
Competition works.
Frank Warner
Recent Comments