Textbooks are obviously open to the same digitization and free-access issues as other media, but their sales model fundamentally different because it's one giant principal-agent problem.
In public schools, digitization won't touch textbook profits any time soon because they're bought in bulk, and because multi-year use keeps costs reasonable. Giving out digital copies isn't a major edge if you can get 5-10 years out of a book. As for college students, there's just very little incentive to care about costs. Example: for many of my classes, buying and reselling textbooks, renting them, and getting digital-only access mysteriously converged on the same price - just like you'd predict in a market with no real competition. So the only real question is whether sellers can control piracy or other covert cost reductions like buying international versions and older editions.
So far, they seem to be doing pretty well at it. Altering problems in foreign and new additions doesn't stop everyone, but it deters many students. Mandatory online courseware with in-book CD keys is a masterstroke, since it not only kills piracy but forces students to buy $100 books they might have forgone altogether - no more using library copies if you're hard up for money!
I've only seen two hints of change. One is outreach to agents (i.e. professors) on quality; there are now mix-and-match services that will sell combined chapters from a variety of books, which might someday drive more competition among writers and professor awareness of book choice. The second is the existence of student rebellion in specific majors (i.e. Computer Science) where students are very likely to have digital, pirated, or nonexistent textbooks, to the point where things like "open book exams" are considered outrageous.
I think the newspaper endorsements line was meant to be evidence, but I'll flesh it out a little.
Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, five gave no endorsement, three endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The rest directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.
This is obviously a different question than "is the media conservative or liberal?", "is the non-editorial coverage at major news organizations generally anti-Trump?", or "are news organizations employing a partisan agenda in their decisions about how to cover Trump?
The first one of those questions is relatively easy to answer: according to an Indiana University survey of 1080 journalists in broadly 'traditional' roles, 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats. The number identifying as Republicans has also been falling faster than the number identifying as Democrats in equivalent prior surveys.
The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.
Intuitively, I would propose that cable television leans left with one obvious exception, while local news and television stations are much more scattered - and less dependent on the views of their journalists, since they often have purchased content and partisan owners like Sinclair.
Factually, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard finds that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, news coverage of Trump was 80% negative. They find that CNN and NBC were most negative, while even Fox was 52% negative.
The third is so open-ended that I can't imagine discussing it without agreeing on a bunch of specific standards for evidence and discussion, because it requires deciding where objective coverage of badness stops and partisanship starts.
From a cursory glance, about half of all American newspapers endorsed Obama in 2012 and the other half endorsed Romney. Were half of all newspapers anti-Obama?
> 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats
The problem with these kind of stats is that they never reveal what kind of journalists we are talking about. It's irrelevant (to the question of bias in media) whether journalists reviewing books and movies likes Republicans or Democrats. Only journalists reporting on political and economical topics biases matters.
The negative reporting from the 100 first days I believe is at least partially because there were a lot of turmoil that were hard to spin in a positive light. The Russia collusion investigation, Muslim travel ban, repeal of Obamacare and so on. The reporting about the tax cuts have probably been more positive.
But I don't doubt that most journalists dislike Trump and that probably affects their reporting about him. Given his antics which involves calling them all liars and banning journalists from newspapers he particularly hates, I don't find that strange at all. Given that Trump is an "anti-Media" president I think the reporting about him has been very fair.
If you now think I'm moving the goal post, let me define "anti-$President." If you can show that media's reporting about Trump is just as slanted as Fox News' reporting was about Obama, then I would concede that media is anti-Trump.
Textbooks are obviously open to the same digitization and free-access issues as other media, but their sales model fundamentally different because it's one giant principal-agent problem.
In public schools, digitization won't touch textbook profits any time soon because they're bought in bulk, and because multi-year use keeps costs reasonable. Giving out digital copies isn't a major edge if you can get 5-10 years out of a book. As for college students, there's just very little incentive to care about costs. Example: for many of my classes, buying and reselling textbooks, renting them, and getting digital-only access mysteriously converged on the same price - just like you'd predict in a market with no real competition. So the only real question is whether sellers can control piracy or other covert cost reductions like buying international versions and older editions.
So far, they seem to be doing pretty well at it. Altering problems in foreign and new additions doesn't stop everyone, but it deters many students. Mandatory online courseware with in-book CD keys is a masterstroke, since it not only kills piracy but forces students to buy $100 books they might have forgone altogether - no more using library copies if you're hard up for money!
I've only seen two hints of change. One is outreach to agents (i.e. professors) on quality; there are now mix-and-match services that will sell combined chapters from a variety of books, which might someday drive more competition among writers and professor awareness of book choice. The second is the existence of student rebellion in specific majors (i.e. Computer Science) where students are very likely to have digital, pirated, or nonexistent textbooks, to the point where things like "open book exams" are considered outrageous.