All shelftags marked as required or optional textbooks are chosen by your professors. Your professors study many textbooks before choosing the ones that fit their needs best. The Bookstore is not ripping students off.
Textbooks are expensive and continue to get more expensive each year.
Textbook prices have gone up, but studies show that over the past years they have only gone up about as mush as most other things we buy. High prices for the books do not mean high profits for the bookstore. Publishers continue to take the biggest bite out of every textbook dollar you spend. Each dollar you spend on a new college textbook is distributed in many ways. You can see that most of your money does not go to the bookstore, but to the publishers we purchase your books from.