According to "YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, "companies that print yellow pages had more than 19,000,000 trees destroyed" and "are wasting 7,200,000 barrels of fossil fuel."

But despite those concerns as well as falling ad revenues and growing consumer and government resistance, Yellow Pages directories surprisingly hang on like primordial insects with over a half million unsolicited books still being delivered each year in the U.S.

For the third consecutive year, spending on yellow page advertising actually hit a double-digit decline, according to industry information reported at Simba Information Industry Forecast – 2011. Yet the beat goes on.

Overall yellow pages revenue declines, dropping almost 11% in 2010. But despite a business model that has outlived its usefulness and the wafting odor of festering business decay, the yellow pages industry fights a rearguard battle to hang on as it retreats into inevitable obsolescence. And they do so against all logic. Publishers prefer to blame their business declines on the recession and not so much on the reality that they missed the digitization boat of Web-based information retrieval.

And so despite all the controverting evidence, the publishers continue to fly their businesses like unpiloted small planes into the sides of mountains. They never pull up even though the danger signs are all there.

Three years ago, Emily Steel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted that as customers “migrated to the Web, the industry was “running out of lifelines.” See “Extinction Threatens Yellow-Pages Publishers.”

When she prophesized that, it was barely 7 months after Apple had launched its iPhone, which along with Android, Blackberry,Windows and other web-enabled smartphones have radically transformed the user access point for vendor and service-provider information.

Indeed, over 4 years ago, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an advertising audience that "the traditional Yellow Pages are doomed as voice-activated internet searches combined with on-screen interfaces on smart mobile devices gets better and proliferate." See ..." - Seattle Times.

Lawyers are migrating away, too.

Meanwhile, while all this is happening, search engine optimizers and web marketers aggressively solicit advertising from law firms as lawyers increasingly second guess the value of Yellow Pages advertising. As a matter of fact, it was 5 years ago when lawyers were starting to notice asking with respect to deluge."

And law marketing blogger Larry Bodine at "Law Firm Yellow Page Advertising, Poor Return On Investment."

And to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of its death are unexaggerated. As recently as early June this year, in a front-page story,.com noted that not only are Yellow Pages directories being targeted but that the phone companies are also asking state governments to approve terminating the delivery of residential white pages.

Municipalities waging war against phone books.

By a vote of 9-1, San Francisco, California's Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance banning the delivery of unsolicited Yellow Pages directories. And when Mayor Ed Lee signed the ordinance on May 19, 2011, San Francisco became the first city in the nation banning unsolicited Yellow Pages drop-offs.

San Francisco leads with ban on unwanted Yellow Pages ..." - USA Today. Seattle, Washington has also moved in the same direction and passed its own ordinance to establish an opt-out system to allow residents and businesses to stop receiving unwanted phone directories. 

The publishers, though, are fighting back. Seattle has been sued by two publishers as well as by the Yellow Pages Association on grounds of economic harm and violations of First Amendment Free Speech. And just weeks after San Francisco enacted its ordinance, the announcement came of the " to Limitless Government Power Over Media."

But when it comes down to it, as all Trekkies and futurists know, "Resistance is Futile." All this litigation and fighting back are ultimately only delaying tactics on the road to extinction.

Photo 1: morgueFile;

morgueFile.