The Most Popular Business Books

Currently in your local bookstore are a number of newly released books that can provide rich insight and glorious financial understanding of a variety of hot business topics. From the stock market to the supermarket, these books have hit a vein in the American public by enlightening them to subjects that heretofore seemed elusive and confounding. Here are a few of these successful books, and a little bit about why you might want to pick them up when you have a little extra money.

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets by William Bonner is a look at societal groupthink and why it’s so important to forge your own path when it comes to investing in the stock market. Taking a rather bold and unusual stance against such “safe” investments as mutual funds, Bonner and his coauthor take a look at mass thinking and why it so seldom resembles sound investment strategy.

Results That Last: Hardwiring Behaviors That Will Take Your Company to the Top by Quint Studer will be released sometime in October and promises an interesting look at what makes a business successful in the long run. Studer argues that a businesses success has little to do with products or service and everything to do with positive and exciting leadership. While a good product or innovative service may be the ticket to the top for a short while, it is Studer’s intention to demonstrate that the companies that last the longest and stay at the top do so through strong management and his book provides proven leadership strategies.

Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love by Pat O’Bryan is a tome dedicated to showing the average everyman how to create an online business that requires little day to day work to produce a flow of passive income. Without reading the book, it seems to be mostly geared toward the production of a website and the sales of informational e-books, and the salesmanship and strategies toward making these e-book websites a success.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris is a fascinating book by a Princeton lecturer who has found and put to use a number of secrets for living in the now, and not waiting for retirement to enjoy relaxation. Its strategies include how to retrain your supervisors into putting a higher value on results and production than actual presence, and how to trade a fulltime career for several short “work bursts” sprinkled with mini-retirements. A must have for those tired of living for the clock.

These are just a handful of the interesting books at the top of the bestseller’s lists. There are many more for those patients enough to peruse the stacks, read the reviews, and avoid judging a book by its cover. Read, and be filled up with knowledge.

Business books have come a long way - but are they worth the read?

Business books are today’s fastest-growing categories in the professional/trade publishing industry. Business books are a great asset to a person interested in starting his or her first small business and in recent years they have fast turned from heavy theoretical textbooks to a far more readable story format. In a recent interview with renowned business columnist Dave Borgner, Jack Yale asked him why it had taken so long for business books to catch on with most people. He answered in part by saying that in the past, between 45 percent and 62 percent of all business books were harder to read than other kinds of books because 68 percent of them used more complex words than we did. David Williamson, CEO of Mark Hallet Financial Services Inc. and the author of the top selling news letter "Brands That Sell", thinks most business books are too theoretical. The interesting business books are the ones that not only get the facts right but also tell a story in an interesting and appealing manner.

But today, business books are far more approachable than in years past – they tend to be more readable, more useful and may actually help to encourage more people to read this genre. As the business book category has matured, Barnes and Noble insiders report that business books are among the company’s top five categories. Over 5000 new business books are published each year in the United States alone, and we are beginning to see some titles encroaching onto the New York Times Bestseller list. But beyond those red-hot numbers is what some publishing executives call a vast ''gray area'' in the way business books are sold, tracked and ranked. Something like 93% of all business books are never read (most readers get thru one chapter and then give up). I think that one of the problems is that a lot of business books are just too general and don't explain to a reader how to actually implement their ideas, or sometimes even the authors don't know how to implement their ideas. On the one hand, business books are necessarily about generalizations – on the other hand your company is necessarily all about specifics – so herein lies a dilemma.

The business books are valuable sources of information as well as information on the strategies taken up by a particular company or updated information on the present funding trend, interviews with leading business personalities and suggestions on the ways of capitalization in a business. It can be hard to know which new business books are the most beneficial, and impossible to find the time to read all of them.