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I think you have a good grasp of the economics and politics of textbooks. I would just add a few observations of my own:

1. The faculty. Keep in mind that it is the professor who ultimately decides which book is ordered, not the publisher. The various publishers must compete with each other for the attention of the professor. If they want sales, they must respond to what the faculty say they want.

That explains, at least in part, why books on trigonometry or other established subjects undergo frequent changes. If the faculty say they want this or that topic included, you can bet it will be added to the next edition. (No one ever seems to want topics deleted, so each edition is longer than the one before.) The faculty want four colors and glossy paper? That is what they will get.

In math, science, and engineering, professors often want new homework problems to assign. Otherwise, students will just copy the homework from previous classes.

2. Used books. You are right that the used-book market greatly influences the marketing decisions by the publishers, who know that they must make their profit on the first-year sales. (As you are aware, but most students are not, neither the publisher nor the author makes anything on the resale of a book.) I believe that the high price of textbooks is largely the result of the used-book market. I also believe there may be a better pricing strategy that would avoid the problem.

Parenthetically, I must say that it has always struck me as strange that my students clamor for open-book exams, arguing that in the "real world" they will always be able to look things up; then they turn around and sell back their textbooks at the end of the semester. I always kept my textbooks, and still find them useful.

3. Alternative media. The question that started this thread was, "Why only textbooks and not CDs?" That is, why don't publishers make their books available in alternative media? The answer is obvious in light of the controversy over music down-loading. As soon as a textbook is available in digital form, there will be no more sales. At this point, no one has proposed a solution to this problem.

The original CD question brings up something that our college has been struggling with. I've been pushing big time for us to get rid of dedicated computer labs and go to a wifi system with single high grade ethernet drops in each classroom and using something like the Apple "classroom on a cart", where a wireless system and twenty or so laptops can be rolled in and used during the class. Other colleges I've spoken with are looking at trying to develop some system where every student has a laptop. One of the big barriers for me, as my texts are available as CDs, is that we frequently work from the text in class, and probably less than 15% of my students have laptops. Most of the computer interfaces on books on CD also tend to be pretty clunky. However, I've probably got about 2/3rds of my reference material for my classes on some form of computer retrieval system now. It will come, but the biggest barrier now is that the instructors can't assign a CD unless everyone in the class has a laptop. Particularly in the high school and middle schools, this isn't practical for government schools. I know that quite a few of the higher end private schools have a laptop on the required supplies list, along with notebooks, pens, etc.