alt Hacker NewsHigher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers.
You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia.
Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.
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Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs
So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?
Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.
Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.
Why not choose different books? For most subjects, why not old books or wikibooks?
"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.
Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.
The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.
That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.
Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.