But as you can imagine the usage of the white pages has dropped drastically as well, for a couple main reasons:

• Mobile phone growth and applications
• People searching online for people rather than picking up the book

Although the second one is obvious and the first one is as well for the most part, I think the part that many people miss is that since the majority of cell phone numbers are unlisted you will not find them anywhere, online or off.

Well, AT&T has figured this out and without much fanfare has killed the publishing of the White Pages sections in many phone books.

State commissions typically only make it a requirement for the phone companies to make the directory listings available NOT actually requiring the printing of them, unless required.

So what happened when they did this?

A couple quick points of reference, in Milwaukee, where this was first tested in September of last year there was a less than 2 percent request rate to actually get a copy, LESS THAN 2 PERCENT. If that is not a statistic to take note of I am not sure what is.

In Austin and Atlanta the request rate was 3 percent. Think about that a bit, the delivery rate before was 100 percent, but only 3 percent actually wanted them. Waste much????

To read a bit more about this check out Madison.com