The February 19th issue of Inside Higher Education has an article that will give you more insight into what's going on. It lists a number of techniques that faculty can take to help reduce the porices students pay for textbooks and makes reference to pending legislation at the Federal and State levels. You can access the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/textbooks.
One of the more interesting bits in the article is the experiments that universities like the University of Virginia and Notre Dame are taking in making textbook rental programs available to their students. One proposal at the Federal level would create a a competitive grant pool of $50 million for up to ten colleges to set up textbook rental programs. More conversation about issues we've discussed before: greater transparency in pricing, making faculty aware of when new editions are scheduled to be released, unbundling texts from electronic media, etc.
This issue is not going away. To the contrary, it's gathering momentum.