Becky Pineo received help from Harry Gordon at her phone book protest yesterday. She asked people to bring unwanted phone books, which she dropped at a Yellow Pages’ office.
(Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)
Protester says it’s time to close the book on phone directories
Becky Pineo received help from Harry Gordon at her phone book protest yesterday. She asked people to bring unwanted phone books, which she dropped at a Yellow Pages’ office.
(Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)
CAMBRIDGE — Every year they land like snowflakes on doorsteps. They collect in piles and bundles, cluttering vestibules and city stoops.
They are phone books, distributed free every year to practically every address. And according to critics, they are used by practically no one. So in a small act of defiance, Becky Pineo decided to do something about it.
“I got my phone book, and I finally had enough,’’ said Pineo of Somerville, 30, who organized a collection in Central Square yesterday to return what many consider antiquated tomes to their publisher.
“It’s spam — physical spam,’’ she said. “When you want to talk about something useless, you talk about the phone book.’’
Taking a page out of the opposition’s book, Pineo returned more than 40 books to the doorstep of the Burlington sales office of Yellow Pages USA Inc. yesterday.
Considered more useful today as a doorstop than a search tool, the books represent the last vestige of an era when finding information required people’s fingers to do more walking than clicking, Pineo said.
In contrast to smartphones that put the power of the Internet in users’ hands, the 2011-2012 Greater Boston Yellowbook, weighing in at 2.31 pounds, 1,376 pages, and 1 3/4-inch thick, is a veritable millstone.
Harry Gordon, 44, Pineo’s friend and co-worker at a car rental company, joined her yesterday as a trickle of people began dropping books into the bed of a gray pickup truck. Gordon said he appreciated how Pineo was turning the tables on the book’s publishers by returning them.
“It’s like snow removal,’’ he said of the piles that can accumulate at apartment complexes and often must be removed by maintenance.
On its website Yellowbook says it has taken steps to go green. Every phone book is 100-percent recyclable, the pages are made of reprocessed industrial wood waste and recycled paper, they are printed with soy-based ink, and are bound with vegetable-based adhesives, the site says.
“We agree that it makes no sense to deliver books to people who do not want them,’’ wrote Matt Krug, associate manager of distribution recycling and logistics for Yellowbook, in an e-mail exchange with Pineo that she provided to the Globe.
Krug did not return calls for comment yesterday, but Yellowbook offers an “opt-out’’ feature on its site and encourages people who do not want the weighty volumes to recycle them.
Despite the option to avoid receiving the books, some who passed Pineo’s bright yellow “Phonebook unsubscribe’’ banner were adamant, perhaps with a wink, in their outrage.
Pat Hollenbeck, 55, said he hasn’t used a phone book in years, and that the eight books that were delivered to his Bigelow Street apartment building — more than double the number of units in his building — would probably go unused.
Mary Woodbury, a Cambridge resident who said that she has not thumbed the pages of a directory in about five years, was miffed at the mess the books create.
“I’m trying to remember the last time I actually used one,’’ she said. “I only ever see them mushing, rotting on people’s step. . . . It’s gratuitous.’’
Matt Byrne can be reached at mbyrne.globe@gmail.com. 
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
