I agree with you. Most uses for the phone book now are for looking up a business. You can’t look up cell numbers in there. I get more phone books now each year than ever before. I usually get three different ones.
Years ago when I was at loose ends with no job I hired on to something called The Talking Phone Book which was an advertiser that did its white pages by copying the previous year’s Bell book. They paid well for slinging plastic wrapped books to every address in the county. They paid by the piece and I netted over $2 thousand(they took out taxes) for two weeks work and they paid me for my gas. I threw books two years in a row. The second year I was working but took two weeks off to do that again. After that the company was bought by another that paid hourly for less efficient slingers and I didn’t do it again.