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Textbooks, especially on technical subjects, is an area where the "ebook revolution" is going to cause serious problems.
Because copies really are going to get easier to make (they're certainly never going to get harder), and textbooks have always been "too expensive" for many of the people who need them, or at least, they thought the books were too expensive. There's always been a huge secondhand market, and irritation at new editions (justified or not, another big debate topic) that require a whole incoming year of students to buy new books.
And now they're relatively easy to scan & send as PDFs to each other--even aside from the official bootleg sites, the "bring a flash drive to Dave's and he'll give you a copy" method has to be active on many colleges. And as much as the "no DRM, make it affordable" method works to sell lots of genre novels; it can't work for textbooks--that have real and substantial production costs.
An author can write 80,000 words of fiction in a few months. Add a few weeks for fact-checking, a few more for editing, and you're still looking at a solid potential for 2 books/year. (Not every author writes at that speed, but it's not an unreasonable pace for a full-time author.) Half a year, maybe looking for an income of $30,000 from that book... which can be spread out over time. 15,000 books at $2.99 is not an unreasonable goal, especially since that doesn't have to happen this year.
Writing 80,000 words of nonfiction, or even half that, especially in a technical field, can take a lot longer. And someone needs to check more than the grammar and overview of facts. The editor needs to know not only if anything's wrong, but if anything was missed--did the author leave out any essential topics? Were the topics that were covered, all covered to roughly the same depth?
The writing takes a more rarified skill base (while not everyone can write a romance novel, pretty much everyone can plot one out; most people can't describe "essential physics topics for engineering majors," much less fill in those details), and so does the editing, and it all takes longer to put together than fiction. And the target audience is much, much smaller; there's never going to be an Amanda Hocking of physics textbooks, selling thousands of ebooks per day for a few bucks each.
I'm not sure where the textbook market is going, but it's one of the areas likely to suffer greatly until we figure out entirely new economic methods for dealing with content.
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