You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia.
Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.
I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.
Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.
Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.
The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.
That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.
Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.
Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)
Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.
Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.
LOL.
I think it's more "laziness" btw. My algebra professor at university was famous for buying a 500 page stack of printer paper the last day of the term, putting it on his desk so he'd be frustrated with it, and after a week or so start writing next year's course. You got bonus points for finding mistakes in it, but there weren't many. The calculus course was the same.