In my almost 30 years of working in entertainment, as both a journalist and a writer, here's what I've learned about adaptation: It is almost always a better outcome when someone other than the creator does the adapting. Why?

Adaptation requires reinterpretation. It demands reinvention. Going from one medium to another is a brutal transition. It can't be the thing it was in order for it to become something new. And, too often, creators don't have the distance to make those hard decisions.

If you think back to the adaptations you love, I'd wager you'll find that most of them were crafted by someone other than the original creator.

(There are exceptions, of course. William Goldman adapted his own novel for The Princess Bride's screenplay, as did Gillian Flynn with Gone Girl. But they are outliers.)

The job of adapting is finding the thing that makes the original special and protecting it above all else. Capturing the spirit, not the letter. It's not to preserve everything, because that way lies madness and, worse, a forgery instead of a breathing work of art.

The longer I do this, the more I think Raymond Chandler had it right. When asked what he thought of what Hollywood had done to his novels, his response was, "They haven't done anything to my books. They're right there, on the shelf, as they ever were."

(That I first heard that anecdote in an Alan Moore interview about his perspective on adaptations spoke volumes.)

So, while it's unfortunate that the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender felt moved to step away from the live-action TV adaptation of their cartoon, it might also be necessary to the success of the live-action TV adaptation of their cartoon.

I say all of this as a person who hopes to adapt his own comics to television. But part of that process is inviting a bunch of other people into the room with me, all of whom have their own ideas for what it could be, and letting them loose.

And my job as the showrunner is to be the creator of the show, not the steward of the comic book. To protect the original spark that made it special while allowing it to evolve into its next form.

Your books will always be on the shelf. And if change is something you can't tolerate, maybe just leave them there.