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Agree that the cost of college textbooks is ridiculous, and the most scandalous thing for me is that the more basic the material, the more outrageous the price in relative terms: for "principles of..." books, of which there are zillions, prices charted run well into the £40-50 in the UK, which is not justified in the vast majority of cases.
But as somebody else said, publishers offer a wealth of other accessory services to teachers (from class management to test banks and so on) that as a teacher of 300+ students you may be tempted to indulge in. Some people feel extremely strongly against falling for these inducements because of the large costs they impose, but if you add that many students, especially in their first or second year, resent not having "the" textbook and being directed to a mixture of lecture notes, material in the library and/or publicly available on the web, etc, sadly it is not surprising that teachers may feel like going along with this massive rip off.
I think part of the reason harks back to the change of the way education is viewed: students become more and more customers that expects a service. As the real value of the education received becomes clear to most students only after they have left, to keep them happy while they are in, many Universities bend over backwards to enhance the so called student experience, and I am afraid that keeping them entertained with courses offering all sorts of bells and whistles is one of the consequences. Whether or not this has a real effect on education is a different matter: there was a recent study (I'll look for the reference later) where students of more boring, sterner lecturers on average performed better than students of more engaging, lively ones...
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