IT might have seemed a good idea at the time but the customers were less than impressed this year when Sensis downsized the regional telephone
directories.
The White and Yellow Pages book was actually reduced to ‘booklet’ size for 2012 and as the size of the pages went down so too did the print.
In fact the fine print was just too fine for many, many people.
In Lithgow as elsewhere telephone subscribers were hostile; without 20/20 vision and access to something resembling the Hubble telescope the directory was too much of a challenge to the naked eye.
Now Sensis — the organisation which sells the advertising and produces the directory text — is conceding the move might have been ill advised.
They’re going back to Plan A and the 2013 directory will be back in familiar territory.
A spokesman said the new books with the larger size format and larger font size will be distributed throughout Australia between March and July next year.
Executive general Manager Carl Rigoni said Sensis was responding to a review of responses from both users and advertisers.
“We believe most people prefer a book that is lighter and easier to handle but in order to publish a book in this format we need to alter the font size,’ he said.
It seems that font size was altered a little too much.
“We’ll continue to develop a solution that satisfies these requirements but in the meantime the regional books will appear in the larger size format,” he said.
And the problems don’t end there.
It’s almost July and some Lithgow businesses have still not received their ‘compact directories’ for 2012/13.
It’s all due to what Sensis says is ‘production timelines’.