Since traditional linear feature extraction methods are unable to handle nonlinear characteristics often exhibited in hyperspectral imagery, nonlinear feature extraction, also known as manifold learning, is receiving increased attention in hyperspectral remote sensing society as well as other community. A most widely used manifold Isomap is generally promising good results in classification and spectral unmixing tasks, but significantly high computational overhead is problematic, especially for large scale remotely sensed data. A small subset of distinguishing points, referred to as landmarks, is proposed as a solution. This study proposes a new robust and controllable landmark selection method based on the maximum volume of the simplex spanned by landmarks. The experiments are conducted to compare classification accuracies with standard deviation according to sampling methods, the number of landmarks, and processing time. The proposed method could employ both classification accuracy and computational efficiency.