It makes far more sense than releasing 5e with only 4 months of open playtesting. Really not enough time to accomplish anything at all.
You can roughly estimate demand for reprints of an old product by aftermarket prices. Seeing as the 3.5 PHB does very well on the aftermarket (read: sells for big bucks) - way better in comparison to any other edition - it makes sense to do a limited-edition reprint.
All three were 324 pages.Anyone else find it strange that the PHB and DMG have the same pagecount?
IIRC the PHB was a bit thicker than the DMG.
The "Provolone" link is now non-working. Looks like whatever the mistake was, B&N corrected it.