THE global financial crisis has some people looking in books for answers and it is boosting sales of everything - from books about the world's richest man to page-turning thrillers.

Borders Group, the second-largest United States bookseller, and Amazon, the world's largest Web retailer, both said they had seen a recent trend towards finance books, from biographies of key players to books about past financial crises.

"People are really thirsting for knowledge and trying to understand what's happening out there and how we could have gotten to this point in the economy," said Borders vice-president for adult trade books Kathryn Popoff.

"We don't see the book sales really concentrated in one or two titles, we're seeing it spread out across multiple titles, which leads me to believe that people are trying to figure out the different components of what's going on," she said.

The Snowball, the first authorised biography of billionaire Warren Buffett - an investment guru whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, invested a total US$8 billion (S$12 billion) in Goldman Sachs and General Electric - has been a bestseller since its release earlier this month.

It is No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list and No. 5 on Amazon's bestseller list.

Outside a Manhattan Barnes and Noble bookstore, artist Anne White, 64, said she bought The End Of America as well as Give Me Liberty by Naomi Wolf.

"I'm hoping I will see some answers about what I can do," said Mrs White. "The financial crisis represents the greed that is taking place in the United States right now."

Among the purchases by her husband Alec White, 64, were audio books of Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

"What better way to escape than down the Mississippi River?" he said.

Ms Popoff said sales of fiction have been strong in the past month, with a trend towards thrillers. "We're really looking at that as the place that people are escaping to," she said.

Borders and Amazon have both seen an increase in personal finance books as "people are trying to understand how it impacts their own life", Ms Popoff said.

"There's also been some talk in the industry about how more people will be eating at home now to save money," said Amazon spokesman Tammy Hovey.

"There has been some increased interest in upcoming new releases from the Food Network's Ina Garten and Martha Stewart, whose new books are about getting back to basics."

Topping the Amazon Movers and Shakers list on Monday was The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook: Gourmet Recipes At Discount Prices, by Christiane Jory, which jumped to No. 162 from No. 187,383 in the sales rankings.

"This is an excellent book for the current economic times," reader Prabash Coswatte wrote in a review of the book on Amazon. "It shows all of us how we can stretch the dollar or our 99 cents."