Bill Carter’s supposedly red-hot “Desperate Networks” (Doubleday, 384 pages, $26.95), due in bookstores next week, went on sale two weeks ago for $10 from the guy who sells books out of a shopping cart at 73rd and Broadway.That kind of distribution isn’t a good sign for the book – or the networks.

I wasn’t expecting much; I’d been cringing at Mr. Carter’s obsequious reporting on the television industry in the New York Times for years and had come to dread his fawning over executives like CBS’s Leslie Moonves and NBC’s Jeffrey Zucker. His stories were almost always superficial and bland, especially given the highly charged atmosphere of the network television business.

Yet much to my amazement, I enjoyed reading Mr. Carter’s book, despite its cheesy cover (what is the significance of a man’s tie dunked in a cup of coffee?), its spelling errors (it’s Polone, not Pallone), and its lame chapter titles (“Idol Minds” and “Lost Causes” are just two examples). I somehow found myself completely caught up in Mr. Carter’s yarn, and must give him credit for at last daring to annoy the people who’ve been handing him exclusives all these years. He shows them all to be petty, difficult, and temper-prone in ways that at last put their achievements into perspective.

Who won’t relish the description of Mr. Moonves scratching his face so furiously in a meeting that he drew blood, and what better metaphor could Mr. Carter have found for the development process? Mr. Moonves’s extended reluctance to truly believe in the “Survivor” concept, as reported here by Mr. Carter in great detail, belies his reputation as its champion. Mr. Moonves lucked out with “‘C.S.I.,” but only because he had the executive producer of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Phil Rosenthal, offer his opinions on pilots to a group of CBS executives one night in May 2000. (Tony Danza must be off somewhere burning over Mr. Rosenthal’s dismissive assessment of his contender for the schedule that year: “Isn’t it enough with this guy, already?”) Mr. Carter makes frequent reference to Mr. Moonves’s deliberate decision-making style; it turns out he makes surprisingly few decisions based on gut instinct.

But in between the delicious tidbits, Mr. Carter pads his book with stories we’ve already read elsewhere: the struggle to get “Desperate Housewives” made, the internal strife at ABC that led to multiple ousters, the ascendance of “American Idol” and Simon Cowell, and other well-worn yarns. He adds a few new details but omits others; for example, he describes the search for a new agent by Marc Cherry, the creator of “Desperate Housewives,” but fails to disclose the name of the “well known” agent who treated Mr. Cherry shabbily at a get-acquainted lunch. His retelling of the controversy surrounding CBS News’s National Guard documents scandal in September 2004 adds nothing to the historical record of those events. Way too much of “Desperate Networks” reads as though written from clips, albeit Mr. Carter’s own.

Still, his portraits of Messrs. Moonves and Zucker and Steve McPherson of ABC do capture the odd skill set required of those who pick television shows for a living. His description of Mr. McPherson, in particular, shows a boss ill-prepared for senior management; he’s a tantrum-prone businessman who opposed “Lost” in part because it cost so much to produce. The ascendancy of Mr. Zucker seems all the more astonishing when Mr. Carter plays it out for us in context. When he got the job as head of entertainment at NBC, he had never developed an entertainment show in his life. His inexperience led him to pursue temporary fixes, like “super-sized” episodes, instead of smart comedies and dramas to replace aging hits like “Friends” and “ER.”And Mr. Moonves, the actor-turned-executive who led CBS’s turnaround to first place from last, comes across as the boss from hell – which may have something to do with his success in an industry where nice guys do regularly finish last.

There’s not much in the way of lessons in “Desperate Networks,” or even coherent explanations for why the networks find themselves with fewer viewers and hits than ever before.Cable television doesn’t merit much of a mention here; HBO only earns two citations, despite its considerable influence on the networks in recent years. But the audience for this book probably isn’t searching for answers; it will settle for entertainment, and this saga of inept management and myopic decision-making comes close enough to satisfy.

Had Mr. Carter filtered through his narrative a detailed analysis of the weakening business model for network television – the shrinking syndication market, the insistence on demographic dominance, the shift to DVDs and downloads as a revenue source – readers would have resisted that sort of serious approach. Instead, the author treats them to a simplistic version of events with stick-figure characters and bare-bones storytelling. In other words, it reads just like an episode of network television these days – entertaining, at times, but rarely memorable.

dblum@nysun.com