Yet there must be some kind of allure to acquiring material wealth, else how does one explain two titles that fell out of the sky and onto my desktop this week: Netmoney: Your Guide to the Personal Finance Revolution on the Information Highway and Using CompuServe to Make You Rich.

Though they are both about making money, they are very different. Using CompuServe to Make You Rich, by Terry R. Dettmann and Susan Futterman (Waite Group Press, $26.95), is a how-to book telling how to get started addressing life's investment challenges, with the aid of CompuServe. Its chapters ask such seminal questions as "Why Invest?" and "What is a stock?" The book explains all the kinds of risk there are, distinguishes between fundamental and technical analysis, and fills your head with good advice on tax-free bonds and zero coupons.

Make You Rich provides helpful advice on when to use the free snapshot quotes on CompuServe, and when to look deeper, for long-term price trends. Users can do a lot on CompuServe: buy shares from online discount broker Quick & Reilly, download company information, consult FundWatch Online to see how over 4500 mutual funds are behaving. To expedite matters, the book includes the latest version of WinCIM on disk, the Windows-based interface that has tamed the unruly CompuServe jungle for thousands of users.

Make You Rich might be faulted for overemphasizing individual stocks and bonds. Surely, the introductory investor the book is targeting is better off focusing on mutual funds. Also, the book has two tables of contents, for some reason.

Netmoney, by Kelly Maloni, Ben Greenman, and Kristin Miller (Random House Electronic Publishing, $19), is more a yellow pages of offerings from the entire online world. On the surface, it has tons more info in it, column after column of data pools relating to finance. There are hundreds of places to visit or download from, on every imaginable money topic -- insurance, real estate, wills, jobs, government contracts, market reports, even travel guides. The info could be fresher -- it lists only one Minnesota Internet gateway, MRNet, and there are scads of others now.

Where Make You Rich is strong as an how-to book, Netmoney still shines as a where-to book. But each has problems that are no fault of the authors, that result from the very nature of online services.

The problem with CompuServe is cost. CompuServe's basic fees are only $9.95 per month. But many of the extended services listed in Make You Rich cost upwards of $22.80 per hour (14.4 baud). Database fees are even worse; I have rung up fees of $200 in less than an hour of hunting, only to be horrified when the CompuServe bill came at the end of the month.

Now, if you are an investor, you are under a solemn obligation to keep your investment expenses low. You will pick one mutual fund over another because it will charge you $5 less per year in fees. People with millions invested take pains to mail in their annual fees separately, so the $10 is deductible. Shareholders join proxy revolts when expenses rise a fraction of a percent.

So $22.80 per hour is an ostrobogulous amount to add to the cost of investing. Have a care, would-be rich people -- the less you use CompuServe, the richer you will be. At least, that has been my experience.

Which brings us to Netmoney. This book doesn't focus on one service, like CompuServe, but looks at the gamut of online services -- CompuServe, America Online, Delphi, eWORLD, GEnie, Prodigy, plus the entire Internet, with its Usenet newsgroups, FTP addresses, gophers and World Wide Web sites.

First off, that's a lot of geography, and you are not likely to have access to more than one or two of the services. If you are on GEnie, all the information in the world about America Online is of little use to you.

Second, online information is of widely varying quality. The expensive stuff, on the big commercial services, tends to be very good. The free stuff, available on the Internet and World Wide Web, is often either incomplete, messy as all get-out, or tainted:

Incomplete. Yes, you can read the current issue of The Economist by Internet gopher. But not last week's issue, because the magazine is only offered to lure you into subscribing. It is a showcase, not a database.

Messy. The world's smartest people meet to discuss financial issues in Usenet forums. Also, the world's biggest boneheads. Are you sure you can tell which is which?

Tainted. The net is not the public library. Information is there because someone has reasons for putting it up. Think about that.

Where does this leave us? With two pretty good guides to some very rocky terrain. Netmoney is 300 pages long, and each page is packed with useful instructions. Make You Rich, costing 30% more, has 30% fewer pages, and many of them are screen dumps and repeated graphic elements. It's also one-color, to Netmoney's two. 

Bearing in mind that they have different aims, and Make You Rich throws in the free software, if I had to choose I'd definitely go with Netmoney. And call it a value play.

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