S'pore Yellow Pages now comes in a CD

Phone books and yellow pages usually conjure up ideas of heavy volumes, marked with pens, or worse still, with pages torn out. Updating merely meant adding more pages to the bulky tomes, and sticking on a new cover every year.

This year, however phone books will take the first step into the New Economy. The phone books will see the upcoming residential listings going onto a CD-ROM.

"By issuing the CD-ROMs with its many enhanced features, we believe that users will find the Singapore Phone Book more user-friendly, helping them retrieve information more conveniently and efficiently," said SingTel Yellow Pages CEO Yow Tau Keon in a statement.

SingTel Yellow Pages, which issues the phone books, will still change the covers of its Yellow Pages, but more significant nods at modernizing are found in the CD-ROM, including packing the CD-ROM with a hyper link to an interactive Singapore roadmap.

This means that, for example, after ascertaining which "Mr Tan" in Ang Mo Kio they actually want, users can get on the Internet to pintpoint the exact location of the address they want.

Users can even get some entertainment while they go about the business of looking up people--the CD-ROMs will also have music tracks provided by MTV Asia, games, and an e-diary.

Subscribers to residential lines will have a choice between whether they wish to bulk down with the "e-phone books" or go for the tried and tested paper versions. They can make their options at the distribution centers.

Companies, however, will receive their residential listings on CD-ROM format by default.