In my experience the people who select the text are just professors, either individually or in some kind of committee. Yes, the publishers will send them free copies of textbooks, but that's not exactly a great perk.
There could really be room for a startup publisher to come along and start selling a $30 textbook series, though. It's not that hard to find somebody who can write a textbook of reasonably high quality for, say, first-year physics or chemistry, and if you make enough noise about how overpriced the other textbooks are it shouldn't be too hard to persuade at least some departments to adopt your book.
There could really be room for a startup publisher to come along and start selling a $30 textbook series, though. It's not that hard to find somebody who can write a textbook of reasonably high quality for, say, first-year physics or chemistry, and if you make enough noise about how overpriced the other textbooks are it shouldn't be too hard to persuade at least some departments to adopt your book.