I have 2 different quilting books on my Kindle e-reader, one called "Quilts/Their Story and how to make them" by Marie D Webster, published in 1916, that I got from gutenburg.org.
The other called "Quilting Techniques for Beginners: learning how to quilt" by Elizabeth Betts, published in 2013, that I got from amazon.com as a free book.
I don't know if it is still available for free because I think that amazon takes a selection of their books, offers them for free for some amount of time, then makes a bunch of other books available for free, but the ones that are on their free offer usually don't have a very high price anyway.
I don't really need a book for basic quilting techniques, but my interest in downloading them was in comparing a quilting book from today with one from about a century ago.
The first difference, which I think had more to do with the authors style/ intent rather than when they were written is that the older book spends 4 chapters talking about the history of quilting, from "Patchwork in Antiquity" (ch 1) to "The Quilt in America" (ch 4).
The newer book does not have any sections on history, but goes right in to the differences between hand piecing and machine piecing.
Another difference is in how the books are formatted and put together.
The newer book is much more profusely illustrated, and most (all?) of the pictures are photographs rather than hand drawings.
The older book is sort of the opposite, with many of the pictures being hand drawings.
Just looking at the language (and not how profuse the illustrations are), a linguist might be able to tell which one was written within the past few years and which one was written a century ago, but without specific training in the specifics of language then vs. now, I don't think most people could.
That being said, in the few places it actually pops up, the newer book is much more "gender neutral" in its language.
The older book, when it talks about a specific person doing something, it talks about a housewife or woman doing that thing, as in "The housewife keeps busy,..." or "Pieced quilts make a special appeal to women who delight...".
The newer book usually says such (or at least similar) things in the 2nd person, usually as command or directive, as in "It is often portable so you (rather than "the housewife")..." and "(you should) use thread in a beige or grey colour..." rather than "the housewife should use thread in a beige or grey colour...".
As to which book I liked better, I liked the older one because of the chapters on history.
The actual content of the second did not hold much interest for me as I don't have any real need to learn the basics of quilting (some pattern or technique that is new to me would be a different story), and as I said, I downloaded it to compare to the other book.
The older book is available from gutenburg.org, and is of course a free download from there.
The newer one is available at amazon.com and I don't know if it is still free, but the regular price of the books that make it to their free offers usually isn't very much.
I also don't know if a hardcopy edition of this book is available, or if it is just available as an ebook.
Brian Christiansen