BT Shipping its Final Paper Phone Books to UK Customers
A small but important development is happening this month as BT finally ends the free distribution of a physical phone book on 31st March 2024. The move, which was announced last year, will bring to end a service that has been running since as far back as 1880. But these days, the vast majority of people use services like Google to find what they want.
The move to phase out phone books, which is said to form part of their Net Zero strategy (we suspect cost savings are a factor too), should save about 6,000 tonnes of paper a year (equivalent to 72,000 trees). Interestingly, BT’s official The Phone Book website states that their online service will also be “no longer available” from next month, although the operator does aim to make a paid version of their paper book available for £10 + postage.
However, BT is encouraging people to keep a hold of their existing phone books, not only because they might become a collector’s item in the future (our opinion), but also because only a small amount of information changes in them year-on-year (i.e. the data they hold is still largely relevant).
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“Those who really need a printed phone book will be able to order one at a reasonable cost, and we’ll also be hosting a PDF version of the Phone Book available to download from our website,” said last year’s announcement. But we still don’t know when they’ll be making the PDF copy available, although it would be logical for it to happen next month.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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They need those 72k trees for poles in Southport.
Good one! lol 🙂
I love that, how do you reject to poles? It’s like they don’t want fast internet
I’d like to see Geoff Capes tear a PDF in-half.
It’s amazing it lasted as long as it did.
I’m confused.
So they’ll have a PDF version on their website but their online service will no longer be available…?
Probably cheaper and easier to maintain.
Run a script once a year and host one file on a static server vs some old web app with years of technical debt that may go wrong at any time and is probably built using some terrible old Microsoft tech which can be EOL’ed at any time. All for a tiny user base who isn’t online but can ask someone else to download the phonebook.
At least we won’t have the paper book cluttering people’s doorsteps and handily identifying who is away to local burglars (because the book hasn’t been taken in)
@MilesT: Good point, but the phone book is so thin now that it easily pushes through peoples letter boxes, for those who have one of course. Over the years the print seems to have got smaller, making it harder for the older generation, in particular to read. In my area the postage was supposed to begin on 15/2/2024, according to a BT call handler. Having spoken to a friend yesterday who works in Royal Mail, he informed me the phone books are still stored in a room at the local Royal Mail premises, and will only begin to be delivered within the next six weeks, because of staff shortages. Hope to receive the last copy, end of an 144 year era! Would be interesting to know just how many phone numbers have changed to Digital Voice in the last books.
I’m surprised that BT hasn’t uploaded the PDFs to a pint on demand service like lulu or Amazon Createspace for people who want to buy a printed copy (delivered to their home).
Ideally a large print version also.
Always excited when it arrived back in the 70’s and 80’s and the first thing you’d check was your own listing
If you were out and didn’t have a pen, you’d just simply say “are you in the book”
Ex-directory folk were the cycle hugging lefties of the day. My mother used to say “they’re ex-directory at 23, they think a lot of themselves
What a waste of trees, should have ended 15 years ago.
This is only for landlines right? So basically no one’s in it, except businesses.
London A-D and L-R (Which have been long-gone now) would be heavy-weight numbers now . . . and that’s sans the “Rubber boat Johnnies” ?
BT’s version of “Levelling-up” ?
We got ours for Norwich (and first in about 6 years) about 2 months ago, probably about 1/5 of the old size, front cover mentions its the last one.
Turns out every property gets a copy, just like junk Mail!