Following the international trend of selling books online, Thailand too is pursuing the venture. At least Business Online Services Co (BOS) of Thailand is bent upon making it an attractive proposition, writes Bangkok Post.

The company has no illusions about its BookNet venture becoming the next Amazon.com overnight. For one thing, it takes a different approach by using the Internet to support a network of direct-sales representatives. But managing director Thada Saringkareekul believes that technology could help to make BOS one of the largest publication distributors of the country.

The company's website has recently opened, but online sales of books are still about six months away. For now it is focussing on selling magazines and building its sales network. BOS will use a multi-level marketing system supported by about 2,000 distributors. The number would rise to 10,000 by year-end.

UAE spending budget up

The UAE, in its 1999 budget, has raised itsestimated spending to Dh22.910 billion from Dh21.393 billion forecast for 1998, according to a report published in Gulf News.

The extra spending budgeted would mainly be used to finance housing projects for nationals, as well as for higher education and social welfare. The two largest slices of budget expenditure would go to defence, which was allocated Dh6.027 billion, and education Dh4.845 billion, up from Dh4.45 billion in 1998. No comparative figure was available for defence expenditure.

Housing received a total allocation of Dh929 million, a surge from the Dh165 million given in 1998, while new projects received Dh1.877 billion, up from Dh1.343 billion a year earlier.

Scholarships doubled

The Board of Trustees of the American University of Sharjah (AUS) has approved a Dh105 million budget for the next fiscal year starting September 1. Funds allocated in the budget will double the number of scholarships and create a state-of-the-art learning environment, reports Gulf News.

ChancellorRoderick French said: ``A generous amount has been set aside for the development of the AUS library which currently has over 12,500 volumes, which will be doubled during the next year.'' Heavy investment will be made in electronic equipment, including computers for the library. Once the library is equipped, students will have access to over 2,000 journals online.

Pak sales tax audit

The Central Board of Revenue, Pakistan, has completed the process of recruiting technical staff for conducting improved audit of the sales tax assessees to prevent them from committing evasion in the financial year 1999-2000, writes The Dawn.

The CBR has been facing massive evasion of Sales Tax by registered assessees during the financial year 1997-98 and the current financial year, and the Board's estimates are that if successful attempts at evasion had been prevented effectively, the Sales Tax department would have received at least 8 per cent better deposits in the previous and current financial years.

TheCBR has recorded the statistics revealing that at least Rs 1 billion was lost in the financial year 1997-98 owing to non-filing of sales tax returns by the registered assessees.

Chinese dream team

China.com Corp is going public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, trying to form a dream team of Wall Street venture capitalists and China's government-run news agency to become the top website in China, according to Hongkong Standard.

Started by Hong Kong entrepreneurs and the Xinhua news agency five years ago, China.com will sell about US$50 million (HK$390 million) worth of shares to the public, said bankers familiar with the transaction. The company's executives will travel to the US in the next couple of weeks to attract investors, the bankers said.