book costs

I'm kinda wedded to the idea that English classes should assign lots of books. Pretty books. Lovely books. And not just lots of photocopied readings and printed-from-the-Internets stuff, free for the students. But this means that I'm assigning about $100 to $125 worth of books per class. Is this too much to ask of students? I find it puzzling that books cost so much. And I'm assigning fewer books -- between four and eight -- than I had to buy in my college classes (where I often had to buy ten to fourteen books PLUS a photocopied reader that was not free). None of the books I've assigned for next semester are those really overpriced textbooks, by the way, and each book ranges in cost (for new copies) between about $10 and $25. I guess in this way, I could just assign one of those massive Norton anthologies and students would still be paying less at $75 a pop. But books are so pretty....