Conventional wisdom among students, professors and, of late, state legislators is that the basic reason for a revised edition of a college textbook is to kill off the existing used book market. However, simple economic analysis shows that this is unlikely to be true. A legislative mandate to increase the duration between new editions could increase the price paid by students and make textbooks less useful from the point of view of professors. I offer a simple and practical alternative proposal that would make professors more sensitive to the price-quality tradeoff in textbooks.