''The price of textbooks will make you cry,'' said Eddie Brosa as he searched for his books at the New York University bookstore in Manhattan. Mr. Brosa, a junior majoring in dramatic writing, considers himself lucky that he will spend only $200 for the fall semester's books.

On a nearby shelf, a 29-page paperback entitled ''Nursing -A Social Policy Statement'' epitomized his complaints. The booklet, barely an eight of an inch thick, is marked at $10.50, or 35 cents a page. Nearby, a computer textbook's price: $65.75.

''For the last 50 or 60 years students said exactly the same thing about book prices,'' says JoAnne McGreevy, director of the bookstore. ''Then they were in the school paper moaning that books were up to 49 cents.''

While prices vary dramatically by field and by institution, on average a freshman college student can expect to pay $200 a semester for books, according to Garis Distelhorst, executive director of the National Association of College Stores. Ms. McGreevy said that undergraduate majors with the most expensive textbooks were engineering and physics. Students in those disciplines, she said, can expect to pay as much as $350 a semester for textbooks. At the other end of the scale, according to Michael Cudney, a book buyer for the N.Y.U. bookstore, are history and sociology. In those majors, he says, ''the price of books is significantly lower.''

Parker B. Ladd, director of the higher education division of the Association of American Publishers, contended that yearly textbook cost was far lower than the other estimates. He said students today averaged only $110 a semester for textbooks.

Mr. Distelhorst said the price of college textbooks, generally not covered by financial-aid packages, had risen about 140 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, the average price of an undergraduate education was rising about 90 percent.

Mr. Distelhorst attributes the high prices to the idiosyncrasies of the market. ''The big thing is that not one copy is sold when the first print run is finished,'' he said. ''You don't know if it is going to sell 10,000 copies or 10.'' In many other publishing fields, he said, the sales are guaranteed before printing begins. Another factor raising the cost of textbooks, Mr. Distelhorst said, is that a large number of books are distributed free to professors in an effort to solicit business.

Students respond to the high cost of textbooks by doing everything from sharing books to photocopying them. Mr. Ladd estimates that illegal photocopying costs the industry a minimum of $100 million a year and forces price rises of textbooks.

Eight years ago the Association of American Publishers filed a lawsuit against N.Y.U. charging that faculty members were illegally reproducing large sections of copyrighted material. Despite a verdict against N.Y.U., Mr. Ladd said illegal copying continued to be widespread. ''Some professors who realize the books are too expensive know it is illegal, but they Xerox whole books and hand them out,'' Mr. Brosa said. One legal way students cut costs is to buy or sell used books, which most university bookstores will buy back. Their prices vary dramatically, but resourceful students can cut book expenditures by 50 percent, according to Ms. McGreevy. The used-book market has grown nearly fivefold in the last 10 years - to almost a $500 million-a-year enterprise, experts say.

To combat slackened demand for new textbooks, many publishers update them every three or four years, rendering older versions obsolete. Mr. Distelhorst acknowledged there was widespread belief that publishers issued new editions not to incorporate new information but primarily to ''dry up the demand for used books.''