The "White Pages" used to be the only place that you could find your neighbor's phone number, but in the digital age, the "White Pages" have become an atavistic approach to finding phone numbers. And while the companies putting out these books haven't yet discontinued their service, they are looking at ways to pull down the extreme cost of producing and distributing these books.

One way that companies are trying to eliminate excess liability is to drop the amount of books made. AT&T is trying a new method of dropping their liabilities by making their "White Pages" only available when customers request them.

In the Houston area alone AT&T printed 728000 copies in 2009, and with the drop in demand for advertisers for all print models, it's obviously a losing proposition. This is not to mention the amount of paper used just to produce these huge books that are rarely used anymore.

So what's the use of producing these books at all?

For those from the older generation this is the primary way that they look for phone numbers, and unless there is a quantum leap in the way that these people look for information, this old style of looking for information will continue to be a part of the economy.

But as any of these people can attest to, the "Yellow Pages" are getting harder and harder to find any information in these books as less companies have any desire to advertise their services in this outmoded model. While they have consistently dropped the price to advertise in these books, there is still a marked drop in demand year after year.

Is there any future for these books? Could they even find a way to completely shift the model and start to sell them as discount books? Now that companies like Yellow Book are going online, they have started to move themselves into a model that they are completely unfamiliar with, and has far reaching consequences.

The sad reality for many of these companies is that their business model is simply outdated and will be quickly replaced by new services from the huge social networks like Facebook and Twitter. These new models completely encompass all parts of business and personal life, and are starting to out mode a variety of models of business.

So while the old services attempt to stay up with the pace of digital change, the few models that seem to be holding up is buying discount books online. It's possible that these old services might be able to shift themselves into the new millennia by using this new model, but its quite likely that they will go the way of the dodo as the world moves quickly into a new paradigm.