In “Track Changes” by Mattew Kirschenbaum The story of writing in the digital age can be as messy as the rags that that are on the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot lead of a very high tech machine. During the period of strong growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors used it as a marvel while others used it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing talked about as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing? “Track Changes” balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the ineffable act of writing is always grounded in certain instruments and media, like quills to keyboards. Along the way, we begin to see the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, and they also explore the surprising changed reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud. Writing for a certain audience of fellow scholars who can reasonably be assumed to know it already, Kirschenbaum  uses much of the social, literary, and technological context that would have made “Track Changes” more broadly easy to get.  He really assumes, for example, that the reader needs only the smallest reminder of why the Appleor the Altair 8800 was a powerful moment in the history of personal computers. He also talks about all but extinct devices like impact printers, floppy disks, teletype machines, and the IBM Selectric typewriter like they are still familiar,  even though the fact that a strong and growing section of readers has never seen “Ñlet” or even used “Ñthem” in their natural habitat. Track Changes is a useful placeholder for a soon to be written technological history of word processing and a useful resource for those deeply into in it so much.