A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Kobe: The Story of the NBA’s Rising Young Star Kobe Bryant”

Price: $4.50 (Harper Paperbacks).

Well, as far as quickie, thrown-together, rewrites-of-newspaper-article books go, this one is a fairly professional quickie, thrown-together, rewrite-of-newspaper-article book.

Let’s just say the author’s use of articles from this paper and various other sources is not exactly moderate; but neither is it disguised.

Apparently, the only material that wasn’t pulled straight from somebody else’s work was an interview with Bryant’s high school coach, Gregg Downer, who admittedly is fairly interesting.

So there’s not a great deal of analysis in this book, not a lot of the inner Kobe, and not really anything that hasn’t already been written or mentioned during NBC’s countless Kobe hype jobs.

In 180 fast pages (you could read this on a train ride from Long Beach to Alhambra), author Joe Layden goes over all the familiar material--the father who was an NBA player, the early life in Italy, the date with Brandy, the draft-day trade to the Lakers, all the way up to the loss to Utah in last year’s playoffs.

There’s nothing irritating here, and nothing that moves it beyond the rote: Kobe is young, Kobe works hard, Kobe can dominate games on any level, Kobe smiles a lot, Kobe isn’t big-headed, Kobe doesn’t pass enough, Kobe really is the next Michael Jordan.

The press material boasts that this is the first biography of Kobe Bryant. And, yes, Bryant is a very interesting athlete.

But another thing is clear: He’s about five meaningful years from a real quality biography--when he’ll be an ancient 26.