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OJFord

Heavens - I'd have never guessed titles like '~ Made Easy' were as old as that.

I don't know why exactly, it just sounds modern.

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I didn't know they even had PDF files were as old as that!

Schoolmarms hate him!

1914 is pretty modern.

Indeed. Water cooled machine guns, fabric skinned biplanes, and vanguard communism were about to change everything...

It's all relative. Obviously I mean that it sounds vastly more recent than 1914 to my ear.

And anyway, I confess I don't know the industry at all, but I doubt anyone would talk about 1914 as representing 'modern publishing'.

It's less than a decade from the cutoff date after which books stopped entering the public domain, so by Project Gutenberg standards, it is pretty modern.

Okay, fantastic, arguably a poor choice of word then. I think it's pretty obvious what I mean, and whether or not 1914 qualifies as 'modern' doesn't affect it in the slightest...

Not a poor choice of words at all, modern must be understood in context and you used it correctly. It would be impossible to ever use the word without a debate on definition otherwise. "How do I build a modern web app? .. Here, I found some relevant resources on vacuum tubes!"

A lot of the elements of what we'd call "modernity" were either introduced or became widespread in the course of the first World War so I'm not trying to just be a jerk here; I think it really is a useful dividing line.

I'm not sure I agree to it being anything stronger than a 'catalyst' period, but regardless; as elsewhere, by 'modern' I meant 'more recent than it is'.

exactly. this was driven home for me when I read babbit by sinclair lewis [1]. It's all about "keeping up with the jones's" consumerism in America. It's amazing that it was written 95 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)

This is the "....for dummies" equivalent of the time.

I guess what I'm saying is, for me, '... made easy' sounds just as of our time as '... for dummies'. I'm in the UK, maybe it's a more recent phenomenon here? (I naïvely imagine cross-atlantic publication was rarer in the early C20?)

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