Looking back at 2010, we will see it as the year that digital sales of books overtook those of paper books. According to the online retail giant Amazon.com, e-books leapfrogged over their hardcover dead tree edition cousins back in July of last year, and barely six months later, they’ve now done the same with paperback.

As part of the analysis of The Jungle’s first $10 billion quarter, the latest earnings statement notes that “Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.”

I’m not going to tell anybody to hurl their stock certificates in Random House into the creek, screaming epithets to the sky. Book publishing is by no means going away. But as always, times they are a-changin’. Books are one of the last mediums to democratize. Frankly, it’s about freakin’ time.

TV and movies have been independent for pretty much forever, though certainly websites like YouTube and Vimeo have helped distribute folks’ video creations to the masses, and the plummeting price of increasingly powerful cameras and editing suites help to make those endeavors ever easier. Music has been set free thanks to the Internet as well, and I’m not talking Napster. Any aspiring band can set up a website and make their music available for the cost of a single CD, which anybody can burn at their desk, now. Game developers can distribute their work on the web as well. Journalists can build a blog, develop a media empire of sorts if they like. Just ask Nick Denton or Julian Assange about that one.

So why not books? Why NOT books? Up until devices like the Kindle, Nook or iPad came around, the only method for publishing a book were the traditional routes or via vanity presses that generally cost more to produce than they made for the vast majority of authors.

But with digital books, the several barriers to entry go away. Concerns and scare resources like shelf space and manufacturing costs are gone, and ultimately the biggest concern is quality. The best books can rise to the top, regardless of who they come from. And the idea of the rare book can fall by the wayside as well, since anybody can get a copy of a desired book whenever they want.

Now this doesn’t mean that printed books have to go away. There’ll always be room for printed works, either for wildly popular works and seminal classics, or important books that need to be spread as far and as wide as they can. And in areas that don’t have an infrastructure that can support electronic books, they’ll be even more important.

But e-books have the power to revolutionize, and more importantly, democratize their given medium. Finally books can catch up to their other counterparts in media, and now, nearly 600 years after Gutenberg’s debut of his own printing press is book authorship really open to everybody. Any book can be available to anyone, anytime, anywhere. It’s a change we’d do well to embrace.