Bangkok Post, Thailand, Insider Column.

Dec. 7--BUSINESS BY THE BOOK? WHO KNOWS? Think back ... way, way back to the last century ... say, December 1999. Can you recall the giddy titles of the business best-sellers of the day? Think of The Roaring 2000s Investor or Dow 36,000. Remember Customers.Com? How quaint they all seem now.

Readers were gobbling up tomes on technology and the Internet, and shelves were groaning under the weight of personal-finance books about capitalising from the bull market.

These days, tales of Internet failure are a dime a dozen, and who wants to read about how companies went through hundreds of millions of dollars? Books preaching about ways to get rich from stocks are not finding much of a market either, according to a recent New York Times survey.

The post-Sept 11 world is a more sober place, where even hard-core capitalists are putting aside financial reading matter to immerse themselves in works about spiritual growth, politics and Middle Eastern history.

"I think there are a lot of question marks about what business books are going to sell now," said Daniel Greenberg, a New York literary agent.

"The dot.com book is dead in the water," was the assessment of Fred Hills, a senior editor at Simon and Schuster. "It is essentially unsaleable."

Job uncertainty being what it is, some publishers think career-oriented books will be in big demand, along with advice on investing in a bear market. The big problem is that it could take until 2003 to get them to market, by which time the economy -- or the world -- might have changed again.