The Battenkill Experiment – The Battenkill Bookstore sold more than 1100 copies of “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die” as of Christmas. It was a powerful demonstration of community, love of independent bookstores, and individuality in a corporate world. The experiment adds another chapter today at 4 p.m today, Sunday, when I am happy to introduce Jenna Woginrich and help her celebrate the publication of her new book “Barnheart.” Us writer/bloggers with farms need to stick together and I am happy to be there. Come bye if you can. Details on the Battenkill site and also on Jenna’s Cold Antler Farm.

Somebody e-mailed me recently lamenting the end of the book, by which she meant the rise of the E-book and the reading tablet. As a supporter of independent bookstores, she wrote, I must also be lamenting the closing of some bookstores, and the loss of the wonderful feel of paper and binding. “How sad that people buy books on those metal tablets. I love the book!”

She was lamenting to the wrong writer.  I’m not much into lamenting, as there are many people happy to take up the slack for me. I do love bookstores and I am quite confident they – and the paper books they sell – will be around a very long time. I am planning on doing an e-book shortly, and I consider it very much a book. E-books are books in every sense of the word, and e-book readers are readers in every sense of the world. Amazon didn’t force people to buy e-books at gunpoint, they went out and built a dynamic business. E-readers have opened up vast new markets for writers and publishers and there is growing evidence that they are also driving new readers into bookstores.

I believe the important part of the process is the story, not the form in which it is delivered. Bookstores, like writers, will change or be pushed to the side. Many are changing. I do not intend to be pushed to the side, at least not quietly, and surely not by a kind of inverse snobbery. I love paper books and buy almost all of my books in bookstores, but I completely understand the miraculous opportunity of people to buy books inexpensively, immediately and in their own homes, trains, plans or hotel rooms. Stories are experiencing a Golden Era. There are all kinds of stories all over the place. Can that be bad for books or writing?

There are very  few sacred cows in our culture, especially these days. I don’t want to be one.  I never want to be a charity, dependent on good will and tradition for my survival. Writers have to make it work like everyone else, and so do bookstores. They are not sacrosanct, and one of the things I love about Connie Brooks is that she is open to hard work, service and change,  taking her store into the new era, welcoming all kinds of readers, in whatever form they wish to purchase and talk about books.

So today is another chapter in the evolution of the Battenkill Experiment. I’m proud to be introducing Jenna and hope to see and meet other book lovers there. For years I have been saying I am a writer, not a farmer. And Jenna has been saying she is a farmer, not a writer. She is both. Come help us celebrate a gifted writer at the beginning of a sparkling career.