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I suspect that, unfortunately, textbooks are always going to be inherently more more expensive to produce than novels. With a novel, all the publisher really has to do is have it proofread to make sure that it's written in reasonably OK English. With a textbook, on the other hand, they generally (at least in my field - physics textbooks) send the proof out to a group of people knowledgeable in the field to ensure that what it says is actually correct, which is far more work than merely ensuring that it's written in grammatically correct English. Textbooks generally also have lots of diagrams, figures, illustrations, etc, all of which push the cost up.
I don't think we're ever going to see the advent of the $10 textbook, unfortunately.
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