Readers seeking answers to financial crisis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - American readers want answers to the financial crisis more than advice, turning books by respected economists and successful investors and about past economic slumps into bestsellers, experts say.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett's authorized biography, "The Snowball," has been on bestseller lists since its release two months ago, while 2008 economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman's updated 1999 book, "The Return of Depression Economics," became a bestseller when it was re-released this week.

"People are in the knowledge acquisition mode right now and the next step will be action," said Todd Sattersten, vice president of online business bookseller 800-CEO-READ. "The public is still looking for some sense of what comes next. Some of these books help fill in some of the blanks."

When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama mentioned he was reading about former President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression, sales of Jonathan Alter's "The Defining Moment" and Jean Edward Smith's "FDR" spiked, Amazon.com (AMZN.O) said.

"Within business books many of our top sellers do reflect an interest in the crisis," said Amazon.com spokeswoman Tammy Hovey. "We also have seen a lot of interest in some classic and recent books on previous crashes."

She said these books include John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash of '29," Charles Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics, and Crashes," Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr's "The Panic of 1907," and Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," which has been one of Amazon.com's bestselling history paperbacks this year.

"FINANCIAL INSANITY"

Another book doing well since its release last month is Michael Lewis' "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity," which looks at recent economic problems including the 1987 stock market crash, the Internet bubble and the Asian currency crisis, said Sattersten.

"It is very good, providing some perspective to everything over the last 30 years," he said.

The popularity of the book and a widely read magazine piece by Lewis has also sent his 1990 book "Liar's Poker," about his time working at investment bank Salomon Brothers, back to the top 50 bestselling business books as of this week, Sattersten said.

Buffett's book "is atypical of the kind of business books that have been selling lately because it doesn't specifically say 'put your money here, don't put your money there,'" said Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly.

"Since Warren Buffett is like the only person left in the country who has any money, people are gleaning from his experience, and that's a much more subtle thing than '10 places to put your money in a recession,'" she said.

But Nelson said while people were now looking for an explanation of what has happened, they will begin to start seeking advice on what to do with their money during tough economic times and publishers were already preparing for that.

"There were some books signed up not too long ago that will come out about six months from now that are about where to put your money now and what's going to happen when the stock market hits 5,000," she said.

And there were already signs people were starting to look for advice, Hovey said, with Peter Schiff's 2007 "Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse" and his latest book, "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market is Down," the two bestselling investment books on Amazon.com during November.

Although ridiculed at the time of his prediction, Schiff is now credited for forecasting the U.S. housing market crash.

(Editing by Brian Moss)