Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a produc…
I don't view textbook costs as a "dark pattern", they're an honest signal from the professor to the students. A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another. Students receive these signals and they're reflected in professors' online ratings. To the extent possible (which is a large extent for some highly flexible programs, such as mine), students will go out of their way to drop and swap classes to avoid unpopular professors, further incentivizing faculty to keep these ancillary costs down.