Phone book wars

Now that new phone books have hit the streets in Colorado Springs, the final numbers for telephone directory advertising are in.
Yellow Page advertising totaled 2,929 pages in the most recent Dex, Yellow Book and Verizon directories, up just 15 pages, or 0.5 pecent from the previous year. That compares with 4.5 percent growth in 2006 and 3.6 percent in 2005.
While pages in the Dex directory were up 14.3 percent to a record 1,365 this year, pages in the Yellow Book directory fell 2.3 percent to 1,132 and pages in the Verizon directory plunged 23.1 percent to 432, the fewest since 2004. Verizon's directory is now published by Idearc Media Corp.
Nationwide, yellow pages advertising revenue is growing at an average rate of about 3 percent a year with most of the gains coming online.