New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2008. This book looks at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society. David Crystal investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.