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The cut throat competition that exists in the mobile phone market has been great for the consumer, but has seen some phone makers and service providers take a blow as people abandon traditional landlines. The market for accessories and cheap mobile phone insurance has benefited, but the mobile phone war has just claimed an innocent victim – the phone book.

The Yellow Pages Group last week declared that it will no longer deliver residential phone books in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City and Vancouver, with Winnipeg next on the list. Based in Montreal, the company prints residential phone books across Canada as well as the Yellow Pages business directory. In smaller towns or cities, the two are combined together but from now on they disappear in the largest of Canadian urban centres.

The phone book has a long history. The first one ever published was for the residents of New Haven, Connecticut in 1878, and even gave instructions on how to use this new-fangled contraption called the telephone. A copy of this directory sold for $170,500 in the US in 2008.

The demise of the phone book is not surprising. Smartphones such as the iPhone have fast internet access and downloadable applications for just about anything. If you wish to book theatre tickets, find a restaurant, order a cab – in fact, anything you would have used a phone book for not so long ago – you can with ease.

Environmentalists have also campaigned against the printing of phone books, citing the number that sit unused in homes or pile up in offices.

Is it a good idea to stop printing phone books though? If you haven’t backed up any data, or don’t have mobile phone insurance cover and it is lost or stolen, it can be a huge undertaking to repopulate your phone book. There are no plans to stop printing the Yellow Pages in the UK so far, but it could be worthwhile investing in some mobile phone insurance and data back up software, and keeping your copy of the Yellow pages to hand as the issue will no doubt be raised in the near future.