It is that time of year. Chemists stock up on sunblock, hotels double their rates and bookshops fill with titles for holidaymakers who can leave their office, but not their work.

Some advice for bookworms. Avoid Who Moved My Cheese and its offer of an "amazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life". Spurn Did You Spot The Gorilla?, which pledges to help readers recognise "hidden opportunities" in their lives.

Read instead Google's flotation prospectus. It is free (at least to those not lured into buying shares in the internet company); it includes references to a men's magazine – racy; and surely it offers significantly more insight into business success than any book based on roquefort or large primates.

It is a must-read for anyone interested in the dot.com revolution, management, business investment, communications, advertising and, of course, in how to undertake stock market flotations. Or how not too, depending on your view.

It is even written in language understandable to those without a legal training and, for the first 40-or-so pages - the bits you need to bother about - those uncomfortable with figures too.

From the table on page three, showing a rise in revenues from $220,000 to $1.46 billion in four years, there is nothing so scare numero-phobes until the prospectus starts discussing allocation processes, dilution and so forth. And even this small print is written in plainish English.

In the meantime, readers are entertained to a history of one of the world's most iconic companies, a business which, even after today's reduction in the flotation price of its shares, will still have a stock market value greater than that of General Motors.

There is a section on Google's leaders. On "Eric, our chief executive and Larry and Sergey, our founders and presidents", a triumverate which, on first name terms, runs the company "collectively" and consults "extensively".

We learn of the "winner's curse", of major competitors, and that even the lowliest staff are to be guaranteed free meals, medical care and washing facilities, come listing or no listing. "Expect us to add to benefits rather than pare them down over time," the prospectus says. "We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity."

We also discover that staff are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time on creative thought. "This empowers them to be more innovative," the company says, crediting such meditation breaks for spin offs such as the Google News service.

The phrase "long term" appears at a rate of more than one a page as Sergey and Eric condemn the pressure companies feel to keep results in line with Wall Street forecasts.

"We won't smooth quarterly or annual results - if earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters they'll be lumpy when they reach you," the document says, stressing Google's willingness to suffer short-term pain for lasting gain.

So investors can hardly complain they were not warned of the risks involved in investing in a business which makes a virtue of its eccentricity. Google, in return, can hardly moan if it is forced to reduce its flotation price to reassure its would-be shareholders.

Indeed, the investment case for buying Google stock at a cost of $108 to $135 a share, as originally indicated, was thin. At that price, the shares had a bubble-type valuation of 180 times earnings. Even reduced, the shares hardly count as a bargain, especially as new shareholders will have "little ability to influence [Google's] strategic decisions through their voting rights".

Still, there is a sound reason for buying the stock. That is to support the Utopian business experiment which Eric and Sergey are undertaking in California, and which offers hope that employment can be fun and work not always mean toil and drudgery.

Better this, surely, than wasting money on books proposing that cheese or gorillas offer the path to personal salvation.

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