Do you ever stop long enough to just consider the world around you and the vast amount of change that is occurring? Take the world of book publishing for example. With Kindles, iPads, Nooks and the like, reading digital versions of books or “e-books” is starting to become the norm.

Consider a few of these statistics:

• Ebooks outsell print for the majority of titles on the USA today Best Seller list
• In 2011, it is estimated (by the Association of American Publisher) that sales were above 100 million a month for ebooks.

Will there come a day when digital readers, such as the Kindle, will cost next to nothing, or maybe even be free? What about book stores? The other day someone told me that his old college library now has no books in it at all.

What about the world of over priced college textbooks? College students have much better options today. They can purchase them in digital form.

Apple just rolled out digital textbooks and sold over 350,000 titles in the first 3 days. What is good for regular book publishing seems to be catching on with textbooks as well.

You can also rent your textbook. Neebo, a nationwide network of college bookstores backed by their online website Neebo.com, began giving away 100,000 textbook rentals (worth an estimated $6 million) starting January 2nd. The annual giveaway is just one of many ways that Neebo is trying to save students money, including offering a 20% discount on all textbook prices.

Students can go to freerental.neebo.com, select a book, “like” the Neebo Facebook page (www.facebook.com/neebo) and that book rental is free! In addition, once the free rental transaction is completed, the student has the option of going to Neebo.com to order all their textbooks at a 20 percent discount. Plus, all books ordered at Neebo.com include free shipping. The promotion will run through the end of January 2012 or until all the free rentals are snatched up.

I have always been fascinated by the smoke and mirrors marketing done by credit card companies. Citi simplicity card was named by credit.com as the best Balance Transfer Card in America. That is great for Citi. However, I would give them another distinction. I would give them the award for the best slight of hand marketing campaign in the credit card business.

The first Citi-Simplicty marketing campaign back years ago marketed the same type of message. If you are late with a payment there are no pesky late fees. In fact there are no fees of any kind. However, they don’t market that although they will not charge you a late fee, they will in turn raise your interest rates to high penalty rates in the upper 20% range.

They market to people who are bothered by late fees. People who are bothered by late fees typically are late with their payments.   Thus the perfect clientele for their card are people who will be late with their payments and thinking everything is OK (while forgetting that their interest rates will be changed to penalty rates).

Now they rolled the card back out again. Just like last time there are no fees. However, this time there are also no penalty rates. Plus, you can transfer over a balance at 0% for 21 months. What a deal! Their latest commercial shows someone who produces movies and she is in another country on a project. The project went longer than expected. She had to use her Citi card to buy necessities. She obviously cannot make her payment. However, she is not worried because she has the citi-simplicity card.

Personally, I would stay away from this card. Here is what the fine print says and what they are not telling you:

After the intial 21 months, Citi will evaluate your creditworthiness and give you either 12.99%, 17.99%, or 21.99%. If you are perpetually late or maybe even late one time, you probably have been late on other cards as well.   Even if not, you have been late on their card and not showing responsible creditworthiness. Guess what rate you will probably get? Yep…21.99%. Is that the same as a penalty rate? It sure seems so to me.

The stated interest rates are based on TODAYS rates which are based on the prime rate. Where do you think that the prime rate will be 21 months from now? Since interest rates are at historic lows my guess is that interest rates will be much higher. As a result, that 21.99% could be much higher.

Credit card companies are not in the business to give good deals. They are in the business to make money off of the mistakes of human nature.   Even though the Credit Card Act was put into law to curb consumer abuse, they are finding other ways to take advantage.

If you want to learn how to beat the industry at its own game and get out of debt once and for all, read my book Deceptive Money.   I think that you will all agree it is all deceptive.

What is the smartest thing that you can do when it comes to saving money on fees with a bank account? It is very simple – Opt out of the overdraft protection service.

This is the “favor” that the bank does for you when you swipe that debit card or write a check for something with no money in the bank. By having overdraft protection, the debit swipe goes through and you get charged a big fat fee for saving you from the embarrassment. It gets better. You don’t know that you don’t have money in the account and continue to use the card throughout the day repeating the cycle of paying fees to the bank for the avoidance of embarrassment.

Banks are expected to make 38 billion dollars by this method. Think about it for a minute-that is almost 1.3 billion consumer mistakes generating roughly $30 a swipe. What purpose does having this feature serve? Well, if it is to buy time until the next paycheck, consider it a loan-shark type of loan. I can understand that because sometimes you have to do what you have to do. If it is to save you from embarrassment, well you might want to revisit that decision.

Congress passed legislation in 2010 forcing banks to stop automatically signing consumers up for overdraft protection. Now, you have to opt in for the service. As you can imagine the big banks have found ways to cleverly add that to your account without you really realizing the significance of the decision.

Toward the end of last year, I opened a bank account at one of the big banks near the house. By the time the fast talking branch manager got finished opting me into ‘this’ and opting me into ‘that’ I had a bank account and 2 savings accounts. I would have had overdraft protection if I wasn’t specifically watching for it. So, I can see how consumers are quickly signing up for it. Oh, I also had the opportunity to get one of their Visa cards on the spot.

If you sign onto the account, you get a message that says “Have a back-up-plan for your debit card purchase.” It is very cleverly marketed and again I can see how someone would sign up for it.

Pew Research Center conducted a study that shows the big banks deliberately processing debits and deposits in an order which causes the consumer to go into overdraft.

Recent statistics show that overdraft fees are on the rise again-even after this legislation requiring the consumer to “opt in” to the service became effective.

My warning: Be careful!   Make sure that you don’t let the bank do you any expensive favors.

Have you taken a look at a consumer contract lately and really tried to read the fine print? Beyond the fact that I am 45 and can’t see without a pair of reading glasses, it appears that the fine print is getting much more difficult to see.

A recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out that the fine print seems to be getting smaller. They interviewed Brian Lawler who is a professor of graphic communication at California State Polytechni cUniversity in San Luis Obispo and has studied typography of every kind.

He said that the “the characters' height hits only 4.5 points, which translates to about 1/16 of an inch—or a smidgen taller than the thickness of a single dime.” He also says that the “liberal use of uppercase letters makes the paragraphs nearly impossible to visually penetrate.”

Then there is the limited “white space” and all of the grey letters that seem to run together into one big blob of words. It seems like those retailers just don’t want the pesky details read. Once again, leave it up to the marketers to rely on the imperfection of human nature.

First, it is human nature to skip the process of the details and move forward assuming that everything is OK. Not only do the details take time to process they might just reveal something that would invalidate our strong desire to make that purchase. You know…what you don’t know will not hurt you.

Second, we tend to trust smoke and mirror marketing. Many marketing campaigns are notorious for insinuating an idea that is wide open to many interpretations. Most of these interpretations lead the consumer down the wrong path. This is mostly why marketing works.   Consumers blindly trust what they are told.

The fine print is the only thing that clears up the ambiguity of the marketing by letting us know those pesky details. It is those pesky details that represent the red flags of a bad deal. So, if the retailers market irresponsibly and then make the fine print even harder to read, something is up and consumers need to be on their guard.

Remember once you sign on the dotted line, you have agreed to the fine print whether you can read it or not. As Ronald Regan would say – Trust but verify.

I am rarely shocked anymore by stats when it comes to our Federal Government. The other day a friend sent me this video. I knew that government was getting big. However, I was shocked by the enormity of Government and what that really means.

Consider these stats:

2 years ago the Department of Transportation had 1 person making over $ 170,000 and now 1,690 are making over 170,000.

2 years ago the Department of Defense had 1,868 employees making over 150,000 and now there are 10,100 employees making over $150,000.

In 2009, the average salary for someone working in the private sector was $ 61,051. At that same time, the average salary for a government worker was $ 123,049.

Here is the disturbing statistic – There are 21,300,000 people working for the government according to this video. I found a Wall Street Journal article that states the number is actually over 22.5 million workers.

That represents 16% of those who vote. Now take into account those 16% who depend on the government for employment and higher than average pay have significant others that are effected by that pay and employment. They are probably going to vote to keep current administration in office. If you doubled that 16%, you would then have 32%. Do you think that any of these government workers are going to vote for a President who is going to cut spending? What if that number gets to 50%?

Government is getting bigger for a reason. It is for reasons such as this one (and many others) that lead me to believe that Mr. Obama has a very good chance of getting re-elected. As a result, the spending will get larger and larger eventually exploding the debt bomb inAmerica. Considering that we are borrowing 47 cents for every dollar we spend, it makes you wonder how long it will take?