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ATLANTA (Cox) -- Fame, if not fortune, has blown into town for two Georgia Tech accounting professors. Their book on how to spot funny business in financial statements was published Jan. 18, just in time to benefit from the uproar over Enron. Co-author Charles Mulford has taken calls from, among others, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily. He's also appeared on Bloomberg TV.

Mulford has been the front man for the two, since colleague Eugene Comiskey has been tied up with classes this semester. "Like Chuck says, he's been sucked up into a tornado," said Comiskey.

Their book, The Financial Numbers Game: Detecting Creative Accounting Practices, is not about Enron. The only reference to the company is in a preface Mulford squeezed in at the last moment. "I was afraid the book would get dinged because it's not the Enron book," Mulford said. "The story is much more than just Enron." But the timing could not have been better for the pair's third book. "Suddenly there is this incredible interest," said Comiskey.

It wasn't like this six years ago, when the two published their first book, Financial Warnings. That one was about what to look for that would signal future earnings problems. "People didn't want to hear about it in 1996," recalled Comiskey. "Things were just too good."

Things are pretty good now, at least for the authors. The book was among the top 25 on Amazon.com's best sellers list last week, and through Feb. 15 Wiley, the publisher, had sold 938 copies. But Mulford doesn't expect to get rich. "If I wrote books like this for a living," he said, "we'd be living in a tent."

Advances in e-piracy

NEW YORK (NYT) -- There are few issues that enrage record labels and performers more than the downloading of songs off the Internet without permission or payment. Their problem may be getting a lot worse. A visit to a Web site with a fiercely loyal following indicates that a growing number of people are downloading not just individual songs but entire albums, cover artwork and liner notes included, in less time and with less hassle than it would take to download the songs individually.

The fans are relying not on a new technology but on one that existed before the advent of MP3s, the format that allows music to be compressed into smaller files. They are using zip files, which compress one or more files into a single, easier-to-manage one. Thus 13 songs and the images of a CD cover and booklet can be saved as one file that can be easily downloaded. Fans are loading these zip files on regular music-exchanging services but disguising them as ordinary MP3 audio files. On Audiogalaxy, a free music-sharing software and Internet site that has become the center of zip file trading, there are not just single albums by acts like Pink Floyd, Britney Spears and Creed, but entire boxed sets, like a three-CD collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan's music.

"I don't even bother looking for songs anymore, because all you have to do is type in `zip' and there are like 2,000 matches," said a sophomore at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "All you do is open WinZip, and you have the whole CD. It's a joke."

Most music executives remain unaware of this new wrinkle in downloading. Fred Croshal, the general manager of Maverick Records, said he had never heard of fans exchanging albums as zip files. "The tech kids are moving much faster than we are," he said. "By the time we agree on anything, it's already seven years old." Even officials at the Recording Industry Association of America, which led the music industry offensive against Napster, said the practice was new to them. Amy Weiss, the group's spokeswoman, said, however, that the organization was not surprised.

Few Internet users trade albums as zip files, but the practice appears to be growing quickly. Searches two weeks ago on the Audiogalaxy site, audiogalaxy.com, turned up 2,000 zip files; this week there are more than 3,000. These numbers, though, are minuscule compared with the hundreds of thousands of MP3 song files on Audiogalaxy. (The recording industry association has already threatened legal action against Audiogalaxy for allowing the transfer of standard MP3 files of copyrighted music.)

The snowmobile drive-thru

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - McDonald's has opened its first drive- thru restaurant for snowmobilers -- on the outskirts of Piteaa, a small city of nearly 42,000 residents about 430 miles (700 kilometers) north of Stockholm, Sweden's capital. Eva Olsson, a marketing manager with McDonald's, said she got the idea after learning that nearly 6,000 snowmobiles were registered in Piteaa. "Besides, there is a snowmobile track near the restaurant. I contacted the Piteaa Snowmobile Club and asked them if they couldn't draw the track via our so called drive-thru loop," she said. The club helped get the necessary permit and laid out a new track that includes the restaurant.

Only 300 shopping days left!

NEW YORK (AP) -- Today is the 58th day of 2002. There are 307 days left in the year. Here are some business and legal highlights from this date in history:

In 1801, the District of Columbia was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.

In 1922, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed the right of women to vote.

In 1939, the Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes.

In 1972, President Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai issued the Shanghai Communique at the conclusion of Nixon's historic visit to China.

In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. (The occupation lasted until May.)

An acoustic full circle

ATLANTA (NYT) -- The Indigo Girls have come full circle. The popular Georgia-based duo began as an acoustic act, then grew ever more complicated through the years with dense layers of electronic studio production that baffled some of their fans. The good news is that the Indigos have at last made another rootsy, acoustic-rock disc, which appears to be the style they do best.

"It has a purity to it, doesn't it?" Indigo Girl Emily Saliers says of the new CD, Become You, which comes out March 5. The prime force behind the return to acoustic purity, Saliers says, was bandmate Amy Ray.

"Amy has been wanting to make an acoustic record for a while," Saliers says. "But I was on a roll with wanting to play electric guitar and expanding our production. I really love some of what we did, like the last album, Come On Now Social, but I knew Amy really wanted to get back to the roots."

The new CD is a rejuvenating effort that spotlights the Indigos' trademark vocal harmonies, made even crisper because there are no distracting studio techniques to cover them up. The album features the group's core backup band, rather than the many guest musicians who have participated in recent years.

Want to drive in a floating tunnel?

VICTORIA, British Columbia (AP) -- A tunnel floating beneath the surface of the water could provide a road link to Vancouver Island, according to a company that built the Confederation Bridge between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. No such tunnel exists, but Italy is considering one across the Strait of Messina to Sicily and another has been proposed in Japan, said Kevin Pytyck of Aecon Infrastructure of Calgary, Alberta. The untried technology, in which the tunnel would be secured by cables tied to heavy weights on the seabed, would float some yards below the surface to avoid turbulence from ships, winds and waves generated by storms.

The eight-mile Confederation Bridge, Canada's longest but about half the distance across the Strait of Georgia, cost $850 million. Tourism has increased 30 percent on Prince Edward Island since the bridge was opened, traffic has risen steadily and the bridge is profitable, Pytyck said.

Hard to believe

BOSTON (NYT) -- What kind of manager is most effective? After management professors Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghosal began asking that question a decade ago, they came to this surprising conclusion: "Fully 90 percent of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities."

The authors, whose findings appear in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, studied the behaviors of busy managers at nearly a dozen large firms, including Sony, LG Electronics, and Lufthansa. Bruch, a professor of leadership at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Ghosal, a professor of strategy and international management at London Business School, found that only 10 percent of all managers "spend their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner."