A Better Pencil examines the digital revolution in light of the history of writing technology. Baron looks at how we love, fear, actually use our writing machines-not just computers but typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets-how we deploy them to replicate the old ways of doing things while actively generating new modes of mass expression; how we learn to trust new technology and the new and strange sorts of texts that it produces; hwo we expand the notion of who can write and who can't; and how we free our readers and writers while at the same time trying to regulate their activities.