You can easily get bogged down in the devices that were supposed to make your life simpler. You have documents at home that you forgot you need for work. At The Big Money, the app guru, Kevin Kelleher, promotes the way he makes life simpler: an app. You probably saw that coming. You can upload documents and access them from anywhere!

Sounds like Google Docs to me, though. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve never used Dropbox. But I think downloading something else to my devices to make my devices easier to use, is probably the last thing I need.

That’s the problem with the way things are heading. Apps are supposed to make everything easier to navigate and find and use. Except when you download more than two dozen. Then your home becomes way more crowded than your laptop. I dislike having more than 12 documents or folders on my desktop and I have to use them all the time for me to keep them there. Do you really want to be scrolling through five pages to find that app you wanted? It makes me thankful that Apple thought to include folders on the new iPhone. But then it’s just going to become like a regular computer’s desktop soon anyway. And then the idea of apps instead of programs becomes sort of the same thing anyway.

Maybe we can’t avoid complicating things.

With a renewed rivalry with Apple in the same field, Google probably thought it had smooth sailing. Not so. It’s now expected that the Federal Trade Commission will block Google.

The concerns are fairly valid. The market for mobile advertising is small and if a large company like Google snags too much of the market right off the bat, there will be very little growth and few new entrants.

On the other hand, the sector is small but the other company in it is one which Google is likely to fight tooth and nail against. Apple and Google just aren’t friends. And as long as those two companies are at odds (considering Google beat out Apple for AdMob, they aren’t going to suddenly become friends), it’s basically guaranteed that the industry will stay competitive.

Why let Apple have all the fun? I’m curious to see what Google’s vision of mobile advertisements look like.

When Steve Jobs announced iAd, I was … ambivalent. It’s a good idea, even though I don’t want ads on my phone. And I realize they are a necessary evil. However, I don’t agree with the pricing model at all. There are mobile ads out there and maybe they suck and that’s the whole point, but I find it hard to believe that Steve Jobs wants people to go from paying less than $200,000 for a mobile ad to dropping a cool $1 million. That’s a huge jump.

And if you want to be one of the first, you’ll easily be paying more.

It seems like a rip off. It seems like Apple knows it can say “jump” and the rest of the world will ask “how high?” It gets worse too. Advertisers have to pay Apple when someone opens an app and just sees an ad. They don’t even have to click on it and Apple gets paid. Then if they do click on it, Apple gets more money.

Plus, Apple doesn’t even trust advertisers to get it right. In order to place an ad, not only do you have to pay a large sum, but you have to use Apple’s developer kit.

Apple is taking over the world.

As a young twenty-something I’ve had a cell phone since middle school. Back then I didn’t really need it all that much because, let’s face it, how often was I not with my parents? I’ve never experienced issues arising from not having a cell phone, except once. And I just borrowed someone else’s.

Often I wonder how things were for my parents growing up. People used to meet up by just … meeting up. No calls while you were on the way. No texts to meet me at the diner or whatever. And what if something came up? What if you were running late, or you had to cancel? What happened to the friend waiting there who got there first?

Cell phones make life so much easier and as a result we’ve become so attached to them. So attached, that in a study, students who were asked not to use their cell phones or other social media experienced symptoms of withdrawal. Like an addict trying to quit a drug.

The one thing the 200 students who participated for 24 hours were allowed to do was write a private blog post about their experiences. They felt like they were cut off and were “‘losing their personal connections.’” They admitted they might be addicted.

Of course, psychologically, they aren’t addicted. There’s no official addiction to media. But it does make you wonder. Are we creating a new psychological disorder where people become addicted to connections and media? Or is this the new normal? And if it is normal, should we really be so reliant upon it?

I guess that’s just the way technology goes. We become reliant upon it. I don’t consider myself addicted to my car, but I drive everywhere, even to the 7-11 just down the block (as if I shouldn’t walk to get my pint of Ben & Jerry’s). Maybe this is just part of the natural cycle and a few years down the line we’ll laugh about the fact that we once thought you could become addicted to social media and social networking.

“Does Anna Karenina work better as an app?” asks Jason Rekulak, an editor at Quirk Books. “Do you really want to sit and scroll through 900 screens?”

Another Leo Tolstoy classic, War and Peace, clocks in at 1,000-plus pages. These long novels might be difficult for people to handle on a screen, although it is entirely subjective. In Rekulak’s case, “long-form narrative reading is still superior in the form of a book.”

Another sect of books probably safe is children’s books. Rekulak has seen children’s books on the iPad that are less like books and more like computer games. “I’m not going to sit down with my child and an $800 screen and let him play himself to sleep,” he says. This reluctance is something he believes many parents feel, but not all. This video shows a two-year-old grabbing the iPad and going to town. She immediately starts playing and her father encourages her to use the apps. In fact, you can tell that he purposely bought apps that she could use. This is one instance where a parent believes a child should be comfortable around technology at a young age, regardless of how expensive it is.

“There would have to be a huge cultural shift,” Rekulak says. Today, it is more common for parents “to steer their kids” to books and away from video games. In the future, that sentiment might change. “Maybe you’ll sit kids down with their own baby screens. That’s a scary vision of the future for me.”

“Apps don’t get a very high price, maybe $0.99, so it’s hard to sell enough to make any money,” says Michael Shatzkin, CEO and founder of Idea Logic. “I think they’re more of a marketing device than a product. They alert people and make them aware of the book, but they’re rarely a separate product.”

Quirk Book’s small staff means it has no programmers and any apps based on books come from outside sources. “We don’t have any definite strategy because it’s all so new,” says Jason Rekulak, editor of Quirk Books. “Usually if someone wants to license it then we do.” The Pride and Prejudice and Zombie game was created by an outside company, but it helps keep the book fresh in people’s minds, not that the surprise hit really needed too much help in that area.

In Rekulak’s opinion, certain texts, “where the content is reliant on being up to the minute,” have to begin reshaping themselves. Books like restaurant guides fall into that category. “So they won’t be selling their books, they’ll be selling the content,” he says. “They need to be able to market their product across different platforms.” Apps might be the best way for guides to sell their content instead of an entire book.

This app has the same content as the book but is enhanced with location-based features.

A how-to book can be broken down into short, condensed screens for an app and sold at a cheaper price or given away free. Job seekers once bought a text coaching interview techniques. An app could be a series of questions and answers that one might encounter during an interview or tips and lists of dos and don’ts. Apps may be great advertising, but they run the risk of replacing the book. A $0.99 app with most of the information in the book might be more appealing to customers. From former HarperCollins publisher Marion Maneker’s perspective, that’s not completely bad.

“What’s the worst thing that will happen if the app replaces the book?” he asks. “From the author’s perspective their ideas are successfully getting out there and they’re making money off of them.”

He agrees with Rekulak’s point that publishers can’t be stuck in the belief that the content can only be sold as a book. By only considering printed products and how to transfer them to digital versions, publishers “run the risk of being bypassed.”

But there remains some types of books that could be safe as hard-copies.

Another vision of e-books will be discussed in “the next step in e-book evolution (part 4).”

Harper's Weekly ran Great Expectations from Nov. 24, 1860 to Aug. 3, 1861.

In the 1800s, Charles Dickens published Great Expectations in chunks over the span of eight months. It was common for authors to release books in a serialized formats. Rather than release the novel at once, a new chapter would be published in a newspaper, magazine or journal over a period of time. Then, the author could publish it as a complete novel later on.

Former HarperCollins publisher Marion Maneker predicts a return to that idea with less long novels for a few reasons. Pieces at 20,000 words will be easier to distribute for publishers than 75,000 to 100,000; and when the size of a book shrinks, the price also drops.

“People don’t want to pay $25 for a novel,” he says. “But they might pay $4 six times for a story that is stretched over installments.”

In 1996 Stephen King experimented with serialization when he published The Green Mile in six installments. More recently in 2007, Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road showed up in The New York Times Magazine in 15 installments. Both stories were later published as complete novels.

“If people are willing to buy at a lower price point, maybe people will start writing that way,” Maneker says. “So they can maximize profit by turning a story into something that they can serialize instead of just print in one shot.” The Twilight series might have charged less for more installments. Rather than four 500- to 800-page books, avid readers could have purchased 10 to 12 installments.

There’s a possibility that some books could lend themselves to being even shorter than serial installments by using a technology Apple made popular.

Another vision of e-books will be discussed in “the next step in e-book evolution (part 3).”

The way it stands now, publishers rip the text from a book and slap it onto a digital screen. Voila! Now pay. What they’re finding out is that readers don’t want to pay the same amount for an e-book as a hard-copy book. The reason being is that people believe it doesn’t cost as much to put together an e-book. There’s no actual publishing involved.

What they’ve come to realize is that the shape (digitally speaking) of books needs to change.

Right now the e-book is a boring reproduction of a hard-copy book.

Companies like Vook, Open Road and Enhanced Editions are betting on publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin’s prediction of multimedia books. According to the CEO and founder of Idea Logic, books will be more than just a story printed on the digital pages of a device, they’ll also include audio and video.

Right now, hard copy books still constitute the lion’s share of total book revenue. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-books make up less than 4 percent of the book business. Many in the industry aren’t thinking about them quite as seriously as they should, says Shatzkin. In two or three years, publishers should be thinking about e-books first and finding a better format.

One thing publishers can do is go all out with the technology offered to them. Tablets mean that you don’t just have an e-reader in your hands, you have all sorts of access to different software.

As Elizabeth Bennett enters Netherfield Hall for the ball at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, the music of a waltz can drift over the reader. J.R.R Tolkien’s vision of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings is so complete that interactive maps and timelines can untangle the history and interconnected genealogies of the characters – the reader can then easily see that Aragorn was a direct descendant from his wife Arwen’s uncle.

Many current companies that enhance books like to place author interviews at the front or end of a chapter, but what if the page of an e-book was more evolved than that. Chapters could be akin to insulated Web pages. A small bar on the far left or right could show when accompanying media is available. Readers have the choice to either ignore it and come back or interrupt the story to see what depths are uncovered.

However, there are few multimedia books currently available and so no one knows how much of a success or a failure they would be. There is no guaranteed market for a book that is accompanied by video and audio. Former HarperCollins publisher Marion Maneker believes enhanced editions would be so expensive that it wouldn’t be cost effective to produce them. But he’s not sure.

“It’s what you try and what works and what you try after that,” Maneker says. “[Publishers] try to make the best of the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. The smart people know it’s guesswork: it’s an art, not a science,” he says. “People will know more when people start doing more.”

His own version of future e-books is more of a glimpse to the past.

Another vision of e-books will be discussed in “the next step in e-book evolution (part 2).”

These hotspots are in a number of places the majority of including international airports. A few months ago Google did something similar by offering free Wi-Fi in 47 U.S. airports. Although that deal lasted a bit longer to cover the holiday season and then some. Offering free stuff is always nice for the people getting it, but like I pointed out last time, it’s good for the company offering it because it gets some nice publicity.

The cool thing about Skype’s offer is that it’s a test drive for some people. Never used Skype before? Why not try it while you’re trapped in the airport? Essentially, Skype believes that if you just try its product, you’ll like it enough to shell out money for it. And you can’t feel annoyed that you have to start paying in the future, because you know going into it that the free access is a very limited time offer.

So if volcanic ash is keeping you grounded, try to get something fun and free out of it.

Let’s start with this no brainer: Apple allowed an employee to bring the new iPhone out into the public. Okay, so they had dressed it up to look like the current iPhone and wanted him to test it in the field. The problem is that he tested it while drinking and celebrating his birthday (not that I didn’t think he  should have been drinking on his birthday). The number one rule should be, don’t get intoxicated while holding the future iPhone in your hands. So, yeah, go out and have fun, but either leave the phone at home or don’t take it out of your pocket once you’ve tossed back more than a couple of beers.

The other thing Apple probably learned was that regardless of whether or not it’s legal, if a media outlet gets its hands on anything secretive (Apple’s or not) they are going to publish that. After all, in California, what Gizmodo did was illegal.

If Apple has operated in the past the way they did this time (i.e. sending super secretive devices out to bars months before the unveiling) it’s amazing the company has managed to stay so tight-lipped about their future products for so long. I’m just surprised no one was seen toting an iPad months in advance.

Ok, in Apple’s defense, the iPhone is an already established product and at first glance, the new one looks like the old one thanks to the plastic casing on it. But normally they are more paranoid about people finding out company secrets.

They’re no longer in the “deny, deny, deny” stage, and since these pictures have been posted EVERYWHERE Apple can’t exactly tell Gizmodo to take them down. But what Apple can do is take a lot of money from the site. If the company is being petty they could pretty much take Gizmodo (and Gawker, who owns the site) for every penny. They won’t though, because that would be really bad for their image. But I’d be surprised if they didn’t take some money out of this.