Bye-bye, 943 page books about the storied lives of well-known individuals - the Net says your days are numbered.

Traditional book-format autobiographies and biographies are slowly burning from the brightness of your computer screen's monitor, as public figures begin to move to the Web to tell the stories behind their thoughts and experiences, in real-time.  No longer will we have to endure five-year intervals between updated versions of a celebrity's literary life story to learn the "truths" of what their moments away from the spotlight have been like, because these famed individuals will be taking advantage of the Net's collection of storytelling services and tools to dish out the details of their days, as they happen.

Obviously, people like Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, etc. didn't have at their famous fingertips the social strengths of the Web to bare all and share all.  They had the antiquated antiques of paper and ink - tools our current generation of youth know nothing about - to pen their life's portrait.  And when they didn't draft their own depictions, they'd hire biographers to sweat it out to dish it out.  One way or another, their life would be revealed; but, unfortunately, we had to wait a lifetime to learn about it.

Thanks to the Web's mansion of multimedia platforms, today's public figures have available to them a wide array of storytelling tool sets to broadcast an incredibly comprehensive illustration of what's going down throughout their days.  Literary content, video content, audio content, photographic content, interactive content, promotional content, etc. can all be collectively woven together to transmit a three-dimensional representation of what it's like to live in their $2,000 shoes - which is, obviously, a much more entertaining and engaging approach to telling life stories than printed words painted within a paperback.  Books simply can't hang with the bang of the Net.

Yet even though the Web currently offers an infinite array of storytelling tools that could be used to create a virtual media empire around a public figure's personal brand, these idolized individuals, nor their management teams, still aren't taking advantage of the fan addictions they could be pushing around their popular personalities.  Instead of turning on a modest level of transparency in an effort to satisfy their audience's hunger to gain more insight into their life, they're using lazy applications like Twitter to spit out substanceless nonsense about how they just sent their assistant to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up some fresh double A's for their remote control.  If this degree of fan interaction continues for much longer, not only will the need to write a book about their life be unneeded, but so will the simple idea that they have any business being publicly adored in the first place.

For the past eleventy billion years, only a handful of public figures have been fortunate enough to have a book written about them.  Not only did you have to be fantastically famous to earn such an honor, but you also had to rely on a publisher to put the bound presentation in bookstores.  But now, with the ability to instantly allow access into your life via the Internet, with a multimedia production that would put bio-films to shame, there's no reason why every person who lives in the public eye shouldn't have their own online, day-to-day, reality production (as in, REAL reality) about what it's like to live in their celebrity skin.

Just because book-bounded autobiographies and biographies are wrapping up their final chapters doesn't mean that the genres themselves have also met their maker.  Never before has the future of the formats been as promising as they are right now, as certain visionaries (wink and a smile ;-) are not only changing the approach to revealing public figure's thoughts and experiences, but are also creating a brand new dynamic within celebrity culture that will quickly make all of us forget how much we miss the printed words that previously presented us with insight into the lives we're all so fascinated by.

NOTE: This webisode is part one of a two part mini-series about the pending deaths of book-bound autobiographies and biographies.  Part two will examine what the format's passing means to the biographers who who help public figures turn their lives into public information and entertainment.