just to clarify, we are talking college/grad school texts here.

i have no clue abt high school ones, maybe the publisher is responsible for accuracy and stuff there.

having seen the writer’s side of textbook a little, i have to disagree with you. the proof reading that goes on is largely non-technical, burden of accuracy almost completely rests with the author of the book, and in fact these days most technical authors have access to such high quality typesetting software that the manuscript is in near publishable form when it comes to the publisher.

proofreading and editing are not easy i agree with you—the editors authors work with are incredibly good and do put in lot of work. but they are largely underpaid, there is no way their salaries contribute to the text cost. often first time authors make very little money too, it is the publishing house that gets most of the proceedings. they tend to be pretty nasty about copyright enforcement, so much so that many authors get shortchanged when it comes to their own work. re: popular text authors, it is not as if royalties to them takes up a big fraction of the cost either. for a 100$ book, my guess is that hardly any author gets more than a dollar.

a factor that could be the reason for high costs is that very few people buy them. but i really doubt it, since the price is high even for books that almost all libraries would buy.

Easily solvable – outsource this shit to India

Yes, I remember. But in grad school sometimes I had to buy the real McGraw Hill book. They are expensive !!! Thats when I missed those EEE books the most.

There always has been Tata-McGraw Hill, just like EEE.

Almost every publishing house has always had an India division that is also feeder to markets in Thailand, etc.