I'm not defending the writers of textbooks but, from my experience as a student almost a decade ago, the rate of new editions in text books seemed to depend on the subject and could often be described as necessary.
With Math textbooks I remember that first edition textbooks tended to see a new edition within 12 months due to errors and sections being rewritten, and the second edition would be replaced a few years after that, but many of my books were third and fourth editions that were still being used a decade after the edition was released.
In computer science books that were more theoritical in basis were like the math books I've already mentioned, but anything that referenced any applications or languages was (almost) constantly updated. While most of the updates were fairly minor, you'd occassionally have a professor make a comment about how an example in a previous edition wouldn't work (for some reason).
In the options I took it was a very mixed bag ... On one hand subjects (like Economics) tended to be in a constant state of being revised to ensure that the most modern examples were used, while in other subjects (like English) new versions of many books were being used every year where the only difference seemed to be the font size (producing different page numbers).
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