IT’S not exactly the Booker prize for business but it is probably the closest thing we have. On Thursday, at a gala dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, the winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year will be announced.

For the winner, there will be the small matter of a £30,000 prize (compared with £50,000 for the Man Booker prize for fiction). The four runners-up on the short list of five get £5,000 each. They were chosen from 140 entries and a “long” list of 13 candidates.

Beyond the prize money, however, there is the prospect of lucrative sales at airport bookstalls and online. Last year’s prize went to Thomas Friedman, helping his book The World is Flat, which was already a bestseller, to sell even more copies.

The judging panel, chaired by FT editor Lionel Barber, consists of Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs (the sponsor), John Gapper, the FT’s chief business commentator, Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management, Rachel Lomax, the Bank of England’s deputy governor for monetary policy, Narayana Murthy, chairman of India’s Infosys Technologies, and Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP.

Of the five shortlisted titles, the one that looks most in touch with the business zeitgeist is The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson (Random House Business Books). He explains why old books, music tracks or movies never die but live forever on the internet.

In a world of electronic commerce, he argues, the physical constraints that stand in the way of limitless supply, notably shelf space in stores, melt away. Online retailers can stock pretty well everything, and instead of the economics of scarcity there is the economics of abundance — the ability to offer unlimited choice is changing everything from songs on iTunes to advertising on Google. According to Anderson, the 20th century was all about hits, but the 21st century will be all about niches.

He describes it as a “theory of everything’, which is overstating it. The Long Tail does, however, point to something different about the way online businesses work, particularly in publishing and entertainment. The internet genuinely does change the way business works, and we may barely have scratched the surface of that change.

Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham (Penguin), is a more conventional business title. Described as “the view from inside 14 privately held US companies that choose to be great instead of big”, it looks at some unsung corporate success stories.

Its cast list of unquoted firms includes Anchor Brewing of San Francisco, Hammerhead Productions of California and Union Square Hospitality Group of New York. All are successful in their sectors. Most are owned by their founder or by a small group of people. All have had chances to go public but decided not to.

The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman focuses on a business at the opposite end of the scale — the world’s biggest retailer (and its biggest company) and what the author calls the world’s most influential firm.

Fishman has a battery of fascinating facts. About 70% of Americans live within a 15-minute drive of a Wal-Mart store. The company has shaped entire economies through its purchasing decisions — Wal-Mart and China are inextricably linked.

By interviewing 25 former executives of the company, Fishman has broken through the great wall of secrecy that normally surrounds the Wal—Mart business.

An even bigger behemoth, the Chinese economy, is tackled by the fourth title on the short list, James Kynge’s China Shakes the World (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).

He has an interesting take on China’s economic emergence, comparing the enormous pace of growth of the industrial city of Chongqing with 19th-century Chicago. America’s brash arrival on the global economic scene was similar in many respects to that of modern China. Both scared the existing economic giants and shook the world economy.

Kynge also looks at the global effects of China’s development by reporting from outside the country. The book begins with an industrial plant in Germany being dismantled and shipped off to the the People’s Republic, along with the jobs that it used to support.

Modern business people need to know about China and the internet, perhaps more than they need to know about successful small companies or Wal-Mart. So Anderson is probably the favourite, followed by Kynge.

For sheer originality, however, the fifth title, by Marc Levinson, is hard to beat. The Box (Princeton University Press) explains how the modern era of globalisation was made possible, not by politicians agreeing to cut trade tariffs and quotas, but by the humble shipping container.

It is the 50th anniversary of the “box”. In April 1956 a refitted oil tanker containing 58 of the new-fangled containers sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. The container era was born.

Previously, sea transport was a haphazard affair. Loss of cargo, from damage and pilfering, was rife. Containers changed all that, and helped to pave the way for today’s trade-led prosperity.