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.

It’s well known that Lost was a significant gamble, with its extraordinary budget and at-times meandering plots, which sometimes shed viewers along its six year journey. But on the whole, it is regarded as overwhelmingly successful. And really, credit to the writers and producers who can create a show about faith and make it work on network television.

But we all know that for some time now, and certainly now more than ever, network executives are going to be desperately searching for the “next Lost.” And really, how does one manage that? This isn’t a statement to say that one cannot follow up or even surpass Lost. Far from it, truth be told. I’d love to see it happen. But like any good business endeavor, one can expect the networks to trim the costs while providing the product. And we can see this across the channels, as scripted programs are shut down in favor of cheaper-to-produce, recyclable “reality” shows.

One thing we can know for sure, is that when the next “Lost” comes around, we won’t know it’s the next “Lost.” It won’t look anything like “Lost.” Heck, we didn’t even know “Lost” was going to be what it was for a while into the series.

With that said, we know that “Lost,” and the great successful shows before it, were built on great characters. It’s no more clear than in our most recent example: It didn’t matter at all whether Jack was doing surgery or fighting some ancient monster to the death. It made no difference whether Sawyer was a con man or a cop. We didn’t care that Kate was a killer once she was on the island. They were compelling characters that audiences gravitated to, and that is one of the biggest, most important pieces to the puzzle. It’s plausible that some audiences would have watched Evangeline Lilly make macaroni art for an hour a week and still called it good – such is the power of character.

The other big victory that “Lost” scored, was the way it engaged its audience. Some people, maybe most people, look at them now as loose ends, but the many mysteries that the show introduced, they were able to bring fans together and interact in a way that hadn’t been done in some time. What were those numbers? What was their significance? We may never know, but we do know that a few thousand people have played the numbers in various lotteries around the world since they appeared in the show.

But ultimately, it will be some time before we see the next “Lost”, whatever it may be. Networks have been trying to create it ever since the show became popular, and while they’ve tried, many have failed. Shows like “Life on Mars,” “Heroes,” “FlashForward” and “Surface” come to mind, and those are only a few of the big-budget losses that the networks have endured. It’ll take some time for their wounds to heal, and for the right pitch to come around. However, I guarantee you that when it does, it won’t matter what the concept is. If it has good characters and good hooks for the audience, I promise – we’ll watch it.